When you have a hoard of screaming fans waiting to be able to access your work, it’s important to be able to deliver it to them on time and in a way that is easy for them to access. MiniHoarder has always strived to provide a service that enables creators and artists to easily and reliably share and distribute their work to their patrons, Kickstarter backers, and the gaming community at large. Today we are thrilled to announce one more piece to that pie: Patreon Integration.
How Patreon Integration Can Help
Now before we jump into the setup, let’s take a moment to go through how this integration works and what it will let you do. What we’ve done is take advantage of Patreon’s REST API to allow you to connect to your account from the MiniHoarder website. From there, we can pull down a list of your current Patreon backers. We can then use this list to work such magic as granting them access to special coupons (and restricting it to everyone else). Even better, you can just straight out give them a product. Sound intriguing? We thought so too.
We should mention that there are a few limits to the capability. While there is absolutely no need to manually grab email addresses or keep track of any sort of lists, currently these operations are not automatic. This means that if you get a new patron in the middle of the month, they will not be automatically granted access to any specific products or coupons. However, you can grant them access to whatever they need with the click of a button. With that out of the way, let’s cover basic setup and usage.
Getting Started
Getting setup is pretty simple, but there are a couple of steps that we need to go through before we can start giving your products to your faithful patrons. First, head to your social profile under your store settings from your MiniHoarder vendor dashboard. You should be able to see that we’ve added few new fields. We’ll get to the Client ID and Client Secret in just a minute, but for now, let’s grab the Redirect URI. This is needed by Patreon to tell it where to send you after you’ve authenticated your account.
With the Redirect URI in hand, it’s time to head over to Patreon and create the client. Patreon is no longer actively developing this aspect of their service, so it’s not actually that easy to find where to do this. Fortunately, we’ve done the digging, and you can access that page here. You will want to make sure that the title of the page says, “Clients & API Keys”, and that there’s a blue button on the left side that says, “Create Client”.
When you click on “Create Client” button, a modal window will open that asks for a bunch of information. For most of it, you can put what you like. However, there are three fields that we really care about. For the field labeled “Company Domain”, you’ll need to enter www.www.minihoarder.com. For field labeled, “Redirct URIs”, you will need to add the URL that you copied from the social profile settings from your vendor dashboard. Finally, you will want to make sure the “Client API Version” field is set to 2.
When you finally hit, “Create Client” at the bottom, you’ll be redirected to the client list, which should now show the one you just created. Click the down caret icon on the right side of the client to show the details. This is where we’ll find the needed Client ID and Client Secret. Copy both of those values, and paste them into their respective fields under the social profile page of your store settings, located on your vendor dashboard. Now that the basic setup is complete, we’re free to start adding our patrons to coupons and giving them products.
Giving Products to Patrons
Now that we have our client set up, let’s go through the steps needed to give a product to your backers. First, pick a product (pretty obvious, we know), and go to its product edit screen. This can be reached from the Products tab of your vendor dashboard.
From here, scroll down to the bottom of the product edit screen. Here you should see the “Give Product” section. It will have two buttons labeled, “Give Product”, and “Add Patrons to List”. First you will want to click on the “Add Patrons To List” button.
This will either ask you to give MiniHoarder access to your Patreon account information, or ask you to log into Patreon. If it simply asks for permission to access your Patreon information, then once you agree, you will be redirected back to the product page. If you scroll back down to the “Give Product” section, you will notice that the “Email Addresses” field has been filled with your patron emails.
At this point, you can hit the button labeled, “Give Product”. This will schedule a job on the server to create an order for every email listed that is associated with a MiniHoarder account and doesn’t already own the product. This means that if you give out your patron rewards, and then get an influx of new patrons, you can just click the button again. The new followers will get the product, and the old ones will not get any duplicate orders. Processing should be fairly quick, but might take a few hours, depending on how many emails are submitted.
If you’re asked to click on an email link during after logging into Patreon, note that you will not be redirected back to the product page, and will have to manually navigate back to it. From there, you will want to re-click the “Add Patrons To List” button. Also note that you can add any email to that list. It doesn’t strictly need to be patrons.
Restricting Products to Patrons
Fortunately, restricting coupons to patrons is just as easy as it is to give them products. First, navigate to the Coupons tab under your vendor dashboard. Then, either click on the “Add New Coupon” button, or the edit link for an existing coupon.
Scroll down a bit down the page, and find the “Email Restrictions” field that is sandwiched between the Amount and the Total Usage Limit. On the far right of that field, you will find a button labeled “Add Patrons”. Clicking on it will have you go through the same authentication process that’s outlined above for giving products to your patrons, but it will add the email list to the “Email Restrictions” field. After you see them listed, simply save the coupon, and your patrons will enjoy all of the coupon bliss they can stand.
Note that if you’ve already added all of your patrons to the email restrictions list, and then get additional patrons, you can update the list by simply clicking on the button again. Emails that are already on the list won’t be added again, and only the new emails will be appended to the end of the list.
Wrapping Up
That’s really all there is to it! Please don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any questions or issues with this aspect of the site, or any other. You can comment below, or email us directly at [email protected]. We take a lot of pride in providing services and tools that are meaningful and valuable to our creators, hoarders, and gamers. Happy hoarding!