As a new member of MerchantOS my first project has been to integrate MailChimp as a MerchantOS Addon. If you haven’t heard of MailChimp,
MailChimp, a leading do-it-yourself marketing service, provides tools to over 200,000 small businesses, design agencies, non-profits, restaurants, and e-Commerce organizations worldwide.
As a web developer I see them as a great web service with a powerful API. They also offer a helpful API wrapper that can get any PHP project off the ground quickly. So quickly that our service with MailChimp should be available early in 2010.
Our integration revolves around populating the primary unit of storage MailChimp offers, the member list. We will allow our merchants to sync their customer list to a member list in MailChimp. Accordingly, if a merchant edits a customer’s information in her customer database, that change is reflected in the MailChimp list auto-magically. This means you’ll be able to send emails to your customers in mass or send an email on your customers birthday automatically (for example).