How are you guys getting on with the summer deals? Have you managed to get those games from your bucket list when they came on offer? So its been a few sprints since our last Letters From the Engine Room and we have mainly been working on internationalisation so we can support currencies that have more digits when purchasing a game. There has been a start on a little makeover for some bits of the community but we are at a too early stage for me to diverge details.
What I can talk about however is a new feature we have for our affiliates. Say you browse your favourite deal site and you see the game you want. You click get deal but now you are on Green Man Gaming and you have to click “add to basket”. What a pain! What if you see the top 10 games and you want to buy them all? Well on that site, you click one game, go to Green Man Gaming, add to basket. Go back to the deal site, select the next game to go to Green Man Gaming and then add to basket again. How could the experience be better? What if when you clicked that link, it automatically added the item to your basket? Well thats what we developed.
It works by sending your users to a specific URL. Try clicking this link (it’s ok we’ll wait):
So if everything went well you should have a copy of Fortnite in your basket. A game you guys should take a look at. I have been playing it recently along with PUBG. So How does it work? Lets break it down.
http://api.greenmangaming.com/api/v2/cart/RestoreBasket?
Well you can ignore this bit, it is directing your web browser to the correct page on Green Man Gaming.
itemIds=Fortnite%20%20Deluxe%20Edition%20-%20PC
ItemIds is a comma separated list of product Id’s. You can either get this from CJ’s affiliate feeds or you can view it in the page source of a game. If you view the page source for view-source:https://www.greenmangaming.com/games/fortnite-deluxe-edition/, and search for var gameVariantCode = ‘ you will see the code we used above.
&itemqty=1
ItemQty is a comma separated list of the quantity of each item you want to add to your basket. In this case we add 1. Changing 2 you will add 2 copies.
A more complex example:
Here we added Bioshock and this time we added two copies. Please note every time you go to that URL it clears your basket first. So the final step is to add the your Commision Junction deep link tracking URL to make sure you credited for the sale. You can find more info on that at http://www.uk.cj.com/publisher/deep-link-generator
A basket on Green Man Gaming expires after 15 minutes. We do this so that once you add an item to your basket, we will honour it at that price for those 15 minutes even if we put the price up while you are checking out. This means we are unable to save baskets