My brother wrote a Magento module recently – the Facebook Connect Module. It’s pretty straightforward, and allows you to make it easier for shoppers to enter in their information in to your Magento store. When checking out, they can connect their Facebook info, using the Facebook Connect process, and their information will be imported in to your Magento store. It’s not free – there is a charge for this, but the source code is included, not obfuscated or encrypted, so if you need to extend it or make customizations, you can.
Possibly one of the more interesting things it does: “Alerts users via Facebook notifications to changes in their order.” This sort of social networking integration with ecommerce sites will possibly be more common in the future – perhaps some other sites are doing it already that I don’t know about?
You can also just sign up for the mailing list to be notified about new features and such over at http://biz.metrofindings.com/main.page/facebook_connect_magento_module.html
What other sorts of Magento tie ins to social networks would you like to see?
Very nice! That’s a very useful feature.
We’ve used Drupal as middleware for connecting Magento and external authentication services like Facebook Connect (and MySpace ID, Twitter, etc.) but haven’t done anything yet with Facebook alerts. Thanks for the inspiration!
I purchase the Module, but I have being most disappointed a the help from the site. The Support forum has no support whatsoever, there is nothing to help build the “facebook Application” in order to get the API key.
Your MOD might be good, but what’s the use if we can’t use it because of missing support. I PAID A 100$ for god sake
Hello Dan:
I’m not the support site, but do know people get support there. You need to register there and post questions there.
As far as “there is nothing to help build the “facebook Application” in order to get the API key” I’m not sure what you’d mean. You need to get a facebook api key from facebook, which is a separate process, and would have nothing specifically to do with magento or a plugin or anything else.
One problem we’re trying to work through is that when users create their account with facebook connect, we have no email address in the account file; so when they place an order the system can’t send them an email confirmation, and the order hangs up… we’re trouble shooting it now, but I’m wondering if anyone else has this problem, and how you might be able to pull the facebook users email address into their user account behind the scenes?
Dan… just go here:
http://developers.facebook.com/
and read through the steps to create your own API key… it’s fairly simple and straight forward.
2 things: Facebook *never* gives you the customer’s email address. The other thing is that this module was supposed to make sign-up really painless on the user, don’t require an email address and send all communications via facebook notifications.
But, FB has chosen to do away with notifications so the module will grow into a plain old quick login module with facebook connect. The customer will be required to divulge their e-mail in order to create an account with the store in question.
Hi. I want to put this on my lingerie website as I get heaps of customers from facebook.
But I haven’t found much reviews on this module and it’s stability. Do you have any example websites of successfully installs..
Looks like your brother stooped selling this. Any idea why?
I don’t know an exact reason. You can reach him on his site to ask directly at http://biz.metrofindings.com :/