Create cart permalinks

Cart permalinks take customers directly to a store cart or checkout with a pre-loaded cart. When you generate a cart permalink, you direct customers who want to buy a specific product from the sales channel directly to a merchant's store cart or checkout to complete the purchase. Cart permalinks work best for apps that enable customers to buy items from a single merchant.

You can use cart permalinks to apply one or more variant IDs to a cart or checkout, or append query parameters to the cart permalink URL to include additional information and attribute an order to your sales channel.

Building a sales channel with permalinks requires the lowest integration effort because your sales channel app doesn't need to request payment processing, and sync orders, handle disputes, or manage refunds.

What you'll learn

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In this tutorial, you'll learn how to do the following tasks:

Create cart permalinks
Modify the checkout
Attribute an order to your sales channel
Apply discounts
Add conversion tracking information
Redirect customers to the Online Store cart instead of checkout

Limitations

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Selling plans don't work with cart permalinks.

Scenario

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You have a sales channel app from which you want to link directly to a merchant's checkout or their online store cart. You want your link to pre-load the cart with two specific products.

Step 1: Create a cart permalink

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Add product variant IDs and quantities to the shop URL.

The following example adds one each of two products to the cart by specifying the product variant IDs (70881412 and 70881382) with a quantity of one (1):

Step 2 (Optional): Modify the checkout

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You can append checkout query parameters to the cart permalink URL.

The following example includes [email] and [shipping_address] as the checkout fields. [shipping_address][city] shows how you can use nesting to populate child fields.

Supported checkout parameters

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Checkout parameter	Description
`checkout[email]`	The email of the customer making the checkout
`checkout[shipping_address][first_name]`	The first name field for the shipping address
`checkout[shipping_address][last_name]`	The last name field for the shipping address
`checkout[shipping_address][address1]`	The address 1 field for the shipping address
`checkout[shipping_address][address2]`	The address 2 field for the shipping address
`checkout[shipping_address][city]`	The city field for the shipping address
`checkout[shipping_address][province]`	The province field for the shipping address
`checkout[shipping_address][country]`	The country field for the shipping address
`checkout[shipping_address][zip]`	The postal code field for the shipping address

Step 3: Attribute an order to a sales channel

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To attribute an order to a sales channel, you can add a storefront access token as an additional parameter to the permalink. Merchants can view sales attributions in the Sales by Channel report, which shows the name of the channel that the customer used to place the order. Sales attributions also appear on the sidebar in the Shopify admin.

You can specify a storefront access token in the cart permalink as shown in the following example:

Step 4 (Optional): Apply discounts

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You can append a discount query parameter to apply discounts in the cart permalink URL, as shown in the following example:

You can also append multiple discounts in the cart permalink URL, separated by a comma ,:

Step 5 (Optional): Add conversion tracking information

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If you want to add conversion tracking information, then you can append one of the following query parameters to the cart permalink:

note
attributes
ref

You can add multiple attributes parameters. note and attributes parameters will display in the Notes section on the order details page. The ref parameter will display as a referral code in the Conversion summary section on the details page.

Step 6: Redirect to the cart instead of checkout

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If you want the cart permalink to redirect customers to the Online Store cart instead of the checkout page, then you can append the storefront query parameter in the cart permalink URL:

Next steps

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Bill for your app