Generating and email a custom QR code when a product is ordered

I am working on a new site that will offer products with custom QR codes on them. I have installed zen cart on a local server and to be honest I don't have the time to dig really deep and modify anything heavily.

My other site uses squarespace and paypal. I can get that rolling in a few hours but I wanted to use this new site to learn zen cart.

I need to imbed a QR code generator in the product page and have it send me an email with the generated QR code. I think I can do most of it in javascript minus the email part.

I can also just display the QR code on the page and send the text to me as an option. Its a little more work on the back end for me because I have to generate each order's code before manufacturing. This is the route I plan to take on squarespace. I'll just embed a text field for the information and set it as an option in the paypal button code.

Is this possible or even easy to do with zen-cart? I don't have a lot of experience with building website and I don't really have the time to bash my head against it and learn more. Kinda looking for the path of least resistance right now.

Thanks!

A lot of questions

• why does it need to email the QR code to you? Does the customer need this same email? Why?
• is this email expected to be separate from the normal order-confirmation email?
• how exactly are you generating this QR code? Is it all javascript on the front-end?
• to have Zen Cart send an email with an attached image, you'd need to generate the QR code using PHP and dump the image contents into a PHP variable. You'll need to supply the code to do that.
• or you could have your javascript upload the QR image to some webserver someplace and simply send an email containing a URL link to the image. Granted, if you do file uploads via javascript you open yourself up to serious hacking.

The customer does not need to see the email. They will need the normal order confirmation stuff.

I need it because it makes it really easy to just dump it into inkscape for laser cutting.

I may have found an alternative solution. I decided to try squarespace. The new squarespace 6 is taking some getting use to but I'm working that out.

I was originally trying to generate the code myself. That was a bit over my head so the work around is to use google charts api to generate it for me. This will give me a url to an image I can display on the page and update as much as I want. I'm currently using javascript to insert the text from an input box into the middle of the url and google spits back the image. I plan to steal that url and try to embed it into the paypal options. If I can't hide it from the customer then I'll just take the message and create a private page to help me copy and paste the text and create the images.

I think the zen cart + php + javascript + QR code learning curves combined are going to be to much for what I'm doing. I have a page that looks great and is almost working now. I'm only making 4 or 5 products. It should be a simple copy and paste process after that.