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 sync orders, handle disputes, or manage refunds.

Anchor to What you'll learnWhat you'll learn

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

Anchor to LimitationsLimitations

• Selling plans don't work with cart permalinks
• Cart permalinks cannot bypass storefront passwords

Anchor to ScenarioScenario

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.

Anchor to Step 1: Create a cart permalinkStep 1: Create a cart permalink

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):

Anchor to Step 2 (Optional): Add line item propertiesStep 2 (Optional): Add line item properties

You can add line item properties (up to 25) to the first product. Properties must be Base64 URL-encoded JSON.

For example, consider these line item properties:

{"engraving": "Hello world", "color": "red"}

To configure the URL to automatically add these properties to the product, Base64 URL-encode the JSON string. Then, add the encoded string to the URL, as the value of the properties parameter:

Anchor to Step 3 (Optional): Modify the checkoutStep 3 (Optional): Modify the checkout

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.

Anchor to Supported checkout parametersSupported checkout parameters

Anchor to Step 4 (Optional): Attribute an order to a sales channelStep 4 (Optional): Attribute an order to a sales channel

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:

Anchor to Step 5 (Optional): Apply discountsStep 5 (Optional): Apply discounts

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 ,:

Anchor to Step 6 (Optional): Add conversion tracking informationStep 6 (Optional): Add conversion tracking information

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.

Anchor to Step 7 (Optional): Add the buyer's localeStep 7 (Optional): Add the buyer's locale

You can include the buyer's locale in the permalink URL so that they land in a localized checkout. For example, if the buyer's locale is fr:

Anchor to Step 8 (Optional): Redirect to the cart instead of checkoutStep 8 (Optional): Redirect to the cart instead of checkout

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:

Anchor to Step 9 (Optional): Send buyers into Shop PayStep 9 (Optional): Send buyers into Shop Pay

To direct buyers to a Shop Pay checkout, add the payment=shop_pay parameter to the URL. For example:

Anchor to Next stepsNext steps

• Bill for your app