Our gifting feature integrates with your system to enable subscribers to share specific pieces of otherwise-protected content to non-subscribers. This is a feature where we provide most of the infrastructure (and all of the UI) for this on our side, however we will need an API from you, details of which are below. 

The flow

Users of your app would see a CTA to gift the article inline within the page. 

When they tap on this they see the following modal allowing them to access the special GiftLink:

The fonts and colours on the article CTA & modal can be customised. 

How it works

We provide the out-of-the-box interface above that allows users to gift articles to other users. You can control how many gifts an user is allowed to use during a given period. 

The GiftLink endpoint is part of the entitlement implementation. We will make a call to your endpoint when the user clicks "Gift an Article"

We will need an API provided to us to implement this feature. This gives you full control of gifting logic and limits. This needs:

• Inputs
  • the user token (or PKCE access token) we receive when the user logs in
  • the URL of the article to be shared
• Response
  • Messaging on number of gift links they have remaining or messaging if they have run out of gifts
  • Gift code
  • Gift URL
  • Number of gifts available
  • Total gift allowance

Example responses

{
 "message": "Thanks for sharing!",
 "gift_code": "x1x2x3x4x5x6x7x8x9x0x",
 "gift_url": "https://pugpig.com/news/launches/?gift=x1x2x3x4x5x6x7x8x9x0x",
 "gift_shares": 2,
 "gift_limit": "10"
}

{
 "message": "You've run out of shares, come back next month!",
 "gift_code": "x1x2x3x4x5x6x7x8x9x0x",
 "gift_url": "https://pugpig.com/news/launches/?gift=x1x2x3x4x5x6x7x8x9x0x",
 "gift_shares": 10,
 "gift_limit": "10"
}

Most users that redeem the gift will end up on your website - we are assuming that the your website will implement the gift token checking on your side.

We recommend using the App Association File/Google file patterns to prevent Gift URLs opening in the app (for example, prevent all URLs with www.yoursite.com?gifttoken=123456)

Piano

Piano does not provide an API for gifting articles, which means we cannot implement the flow as described above in your app. However, as part of Composer Piano does have a ‘Share with a Friend' feature which serves essentially the same purpose. This is a web experience but if you have it set up for your website, the same experience can be embedded inline within your app articles. As with API-driven gifting the redemption of gifted articles happens on your website, not in the app.

Get in touch with support if you'd like to set this up. Please ensure you've first read the ‘Considerations’ section in the Piano doc linked above if you aren't already familiar with the feature from using it on your site (you'll see it does work slightly differently from the API method explained above). You will need to already have the Composer experience set up in order for our support team to implement it in your app.

Example of the out-of-the-box Piano-provided UI: