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Hello. I have been tasked with connecting our WP website with a partner.

Requirements:

  1. We will have a popup for the customer to click which will redirect them to the partner’s webpage, but masking the URL to read something different.
  2. Customer must be able to send emails from their domain, using our domain.

Details:

  1. Our example will be as such. Customer lands on our home page (ourcompany.com), clicks on a link on the homepage, then gets redirected to partner’s company’s webpage (theircompany.com), but we would like for the URL to read (subdoman.ourcompany.com) while on the partner’s page.
  2. Partner will have a login on their page for the customer. Partner will need to communicate via email back to the user using ourcompany.com email domain.

Our company uses GoDaddy / MS Office 365 Cloud, as does the partner.

Any pointers on how to proceed? Do I need to create the sub-domain on our site, then have the index page on that site simply redirect to the partner?

And for mail I have thought about giving the partner an @ourcompany.com email account so they could send to it.

Thanks,
Steve

1 Spice up
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This is a little bit of a weird situation. If this were me my first question to the “partner” would be if they could work with a CNAME that pointed to their host / web app. That way it isn’t redirected out of your “domain”, but rather just was their application being served up under your subdomain.

Otherwise, if it is a link, why have a redirect at all? Just have the link go to their page and be done.

You said the partner needs to email “back” to the customer. Does that imply they will be receiving emails? If so you can simply create a distro group that CCs them, and then add their sending IPs / name space to your SPF record which would allow them to send an email impersonating your domain, or even an email address that is @sub.domain.com.

I am not sure I would give them a 365 account, but then again I don’t entirely understand the nature of the relationship.

Hope that helps. Feel free to clarify if you can.

1 Spice up
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I think your question can be split into 2 different parts

  • email Domains & redirection
  • Web Domains & redirection
    Try not merge them together as they are very different things.

What do you mean by this ?

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Yes I agree it is two parts.

For part 2, our partner will be communicating with the customer regarding order status, account information, etc…

They (the partner), will need to send these communications AS ourcompany.com, not another domain like theircompany.com. Same reason as we don’t want our customers to know they are on another website, hence the masking for Part 1. I’m thinking we just give them a ourcompany.com email and they program their systems to use that for correspondence? Not sure.

Make sense?

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1st Emails: The only way I can think of to make this work is by using a service like Sendgrid. Where the email functions are sending the data to Sendgrid to send off the emails with the correct and verified domain / email account. Other than that you will run into DKIM and SPF issues trying to use smtp relays and such.

2nd Domains: Me personally I would find this to be a trust issue. Subdomains can work if company2 lets you create an A record to point to their hosting server. Why not just use a full screen iFrame??

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|Subdomains can work if company2 lets you create an A record to point to their hosting server. |

but their webserver also has to know that it is serving that subdomain, many web servers are virtual hosted, they share IP’s and read the url’s domain name to know which pages to serve, so mycompany,com and client.mycompany,com have to both be within the web servers perview (eg, it might not be allowed for them to resolve to different actual IP’s and the access rules for the server need to allow the subdomain, and probably need some remapping to point to the same pages without dropping the prefix)

Subdomain email is a thing, in the old days it was just another MX record, but as Brandon points out DKIM rules are going to make that harder (tho not impossible)
you could also split the username instead, eg joe.client @ mycompany,com …

It does look a touch odd ,one of our clients does this for their maintenance vendors, so that service requests look like they came from the company itself and i always have to look at the server email twice before I realize who sent it, but it is more or less workable…