Due to the impact of Covid-19 we are more often attending meetings, events and conferences ‘virtually’. There are a bunch of Virtual Event Platforms popping up and they are being used more and more regularly when large companies are scheduling up large events.

These platforms are great, but what if you have an ecommerce store and running courses is just a small part of your business. Is there a way to integrate your ecommerce store with conference software like Zoom?  Yes there is.

We were recently asked by a client if this exact solution was possible. They specifically asked if it was possible to sell tickets to events, conferences and courses via their Magento 2 ecommerce store and then have the attendees automatically schedule into Zoom.

Our client also wanted tickets to be purchased for offline-in person events (I know, old school), as well online Zoom webinar events.

We started out by creating a product which acts as a ticket. The event ticket product was created allowing day and multiple times to be added to a product page & collect registrants details. Then we split the event tickets into two different types, ‘Virtual’ and ‘Physical’. The physical tickets would generate barcodes to differentiate each ticket purchased and would be printable after purchase.

For the ‘Virtual’ registration into Zoom we initially looked at Zapier to provide the integration between Magento and Zoom to push the online registrants from Magento to Zapier and add them to the webinar in Zoom.

After exposing additional fields to the Order API such as first name, last name, email we set up Zapier to pre-process the data from a comma separated values. We then pushed the data 1 by 1 using Zapier’s loop queue system.  We thought this was the most watertight solution as it offers error handling and other features out of the box to save time.

We tested with Meetings first and that worked. However, when we switched to Webinars, Zapier didn’t have all the fields required to send a registrant to the webinar.

After contacting Zapier support, they confirmed there was a bug and said they would get back to us when it was fixed.

Rather than wait for them to fix the issue and potentially blow-out project timeline, we decided to send the registrants directly to Zoom using the Zoom API. We created a queue in Magento 2 and pushed data to Zoom when the invoice was raised.

If you have a similar need and you would like to set up ticketed events from your ecommerce store, please feel free to get in contact with us to arrange a consultation.