Adding LiveArt Designer to Your E-Commerce Platform. An Integration Strategy Basics
Adding a LiveArt online designer to your website or ecommerce platform generally involves developing an ability to save designs and associate them with order items. There is a number of additional features that can be implemented for the designer to streamline the design and ordering process, but ability to store the designed output is the primary one.
As means of communication, LiveArt uses open XML protocol to communicate with the platform of your choice. Technically, LiveArt Designer expects certain information from the platform or static XML files and sends data requests via HTTP POST back. The saved designs are normally look like XML as well along with supporting resources like uploaded images, PDF proofs and PNG thumbnails. Below is the list of basic LiveArt designer aspects which can be implemented first.
Ordering and Upload. These are two basic services you would like to go ahead with and let your customers use them. Once user sends out an order, it comes to platform as special Design XML file, which you can either save locally to the file system on the server, or use DB to store additional information with it as well. Normally you would also like to associate saved design with the shopping cart item and order of the user, so that you know what was designed by user during the checkout. The same applies to Upload function - LiveArt expects backend platform to capture the uploaded file and store it either on filesystem or database and associate with the user session.
Pricing. LiveArt offers a flexible service which allows you to calculate the pricing on the fly. Depending on product specifics and printing technique, you can calculate the pricing using the information sent from designer (like color count or area in inches, occupied by design) and update it respectively to the user.
Product Automation. LiveArt designers require a set of information to populate product catalog, available colors and fonts. These options are normally delivered through static XML files. During the integration, you might like to manage all of these options through your platform admin area. To achieve this, a respective scripts can be developed that will read out product information from database and generate respective XML files automatically for LiveArt Designer. The same can be done for general options like font list or artwork gallery.
A number of additional options are available and configurable from LiveArt’s main configuration file. For more details, visit our reference section and let us know if you miss anything you’d like us to add. Your feedback is much appreciated.