🔗 Building embeddable widgets with Phoenix Channels

When you’re selling stuff, every click away from your website is a potential lost sale. Customers kept asking us to allow people to buy tickets without leaving their branded site. They loved the service, but wanted to retain brand presence and coherence.

The ask seemed simple enough. Drop a widget on any webpage, show some events, let people check out. But as we dug into it, the technical challenges started stacking up. How do you maintain cart state across page refreshes? How do you track marketing attribution when the purchase happens on someone else’s domain? And how do you process payments securely in what is essentially a third party context?

This is the quick post of how we tried a bunch of approaches, hit walls, and eventually landed on Phoenix Channels as our solution.