Dialect, a small web marketing company on Vancouver Island in Canada, has developed a plugin that connects your Shopify online store with MailChimp.

It works by allowing you to process a Webhook from Shopify and subscribe the purchaser to a specific MailChimp list. In a nutshell, Webhooks enable you to collect information about events as they happen in near real-time. (read more about the MailChimp API and Webhooks here)

You can grab the plugin and installation instructions here. Then, all you need to get started is your Shopify Shop ID and MailChimp List ID.

Use another ecommerce or shopping cart solution? MailChimp also currently intergrates with Magento, osCommerce, PrestaShop, Foxy Cart and ZenCart. Be sure to take a look at our extensive list of plugins for more info.

The Ecommerce Tracking plugin is a free add-on that is available for installation from your account.  We currently support Magento, Zen Cart, osCommerce and PrestaShop, or if you’re a developer, you can even create your own.

The plugin collects only the details of the order, and none of your customer’s private data.  (If you want to check it out for yourself, you can download the appropriate plugin and take a look at the code or bribe your web geek to do it.)  The details collected include:

• Order number
• Total amount
• Tax amount
• Shipping amount
• Product category
• Product id(s) and name(s)
• Quantity of each item
• Cost of each item

Once the add-on is installed (through your MailChimp account), we will automatically add some tags to links inside the campaigns you send. Then, those tags will be picked up by a plugin installed in your E-commerce store. The plugin will then track users who have followed the links in your campaign, and when a user completes a purchase, the plugin will quietly send the basic details of the order– products ordered, product categories, shipping, tax and order totals– back to us via an API call.

I want to emphasize that the installation and set-up process involves two critical steps. First, install the appropriate plugin on your e-commerce site. Second, activate the free add-on under your MailChimp account. The plugin will only be able to collect data if you complete both of these steps.

http://www.mailchimp.com/plugins/

[update: most of the Ruby on Rails "plugins" were actually API Wrappers and thus are on our API downloads page: http://www.mailchimp.com/api/downloads/]

The latest is from Scott Wilson, aka ThatSoftwareGuy, who created a discounts plugin for Zen Cart. Pretty nifty!

Developers, if you’ve got a plugin, be sure to tell us about it. If we post your plugin, we’ll send you a Chumby as a thank-you gift.