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Andy Chidwick
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October 1, 2012 at 10:53 pm
I need help. I need to be able to take deposits on registrations. I’ve recent move from a decent event registration program that ran only in joomla. Now I’ve recently purchased Event Esspresso because i thought it would work for me. So how do I take partial payments (deposits) on a registered event. Is there a plug-in or something? Or did I make a mistake in purchasing Event Esspresso? This seems like such a simple feature for a event registration plug-in.
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This topic was modified 12 years, 2 months ago by
 Seth Shoultes. Reason: Moving to premium forums
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Seth Shoultes
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October 1, 2012 at 10:57 pm
Did the Joomla plugin have this feature? How exactly do you see it working?
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Seth Shoultes
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October 1, 2012 at 11:05 pm
FYI. We have had this request in the past, but no one had a decent example of how to accomplish something like this. So we have been waiting to get a good use case scenario on how exactly this type of thing should work.
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Wesley McDermott
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October 11, 2012 at 3:19 am
Hi Seth,
This is something that my site is crying out for! I offer ghost hunting events on my site which are reasonably high priced between £30.00 – £80.00 and we get a lot of group/couple bookings. People aren’t so inclined to pay the full amount on these events which is why I have a terrible registration to payment rate. People who register for these events hardly ever pay! It’s getting to the point now where I’m thinking of moving systems, which I obviously don’t want to do as in every other aspect this plugin is top notch! As Andy says, this is something that should be included with the plugin, it seems so obvious!
Wes
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Seth Shoultes
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October 11, 2012 at 7:19 am
Can you give us examples of other plugins or systems that have this feature? We have not seen any good examples of something like this. We have had a discussion about this with customers in the past, but it quickly turned into a very complicated and one sided solution.
I would suggest charging a small fee up front, clearly stating in the pricing that it is a deposit, then sending invoices manually before the event.
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Wesley McDermott
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October 11, 2012 at 8:27 am
Hi Seth,
I do understand it’s not an easy thing to do as there are lots of things involved.
After looking at this, it isn’t really an effective workaround for me, as if people paid the deposit option it would mean manually editing a lot of things such as payment status, emails, and keeping up to speed of when that particularly event needs full payment by. As I would need the full balance paid a month before the event, I can’t see how I would be able to keep on top of this without manually checking these things every day! On top of that, I would need a special payment area where the person can go and pay the remaining balance on their account.
If the only way to do this is through adding 2 payment options and manually dealing with invoices and emails, having a payment screen where they can check the amount still owed would be good. On this page they enter their registration ID and the balance is shown as well as a payment option to pay the remaining balance.
Wes
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achidwick
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October 11, 2012 at 9:04 am
Check out dtregister for an example of how it is done in Joomla. here’s a link to an overview of their features including a “allow partial payment” option. A extra option field allowed me to set the minimum required for partial payment. http://www.dthdevelopment.com/dth-news/dt-register-2.6-wipes-away-the-competition.html
I’m not a programmer, so this is as far as I can go to advise you, but I will say that I am dissapointed that this is not a feature of Event Espresso and am considering going back to my old Joomla plugin for registration. This is a “necessary’ feature of my business.
Thank you for considering this more deeply, it sounds like I’m certainly not the only one looking for this feature.
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Seth Shoultes
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October 11, 2012 at 9:50 am
@achidwick does DT Register send out automatic payment reminders for the remaining balance? How does it show who has paid in full and who hasn’t?
Can you (or do they) provide a live example that we can log into and review these features?
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Seth Shoultes
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October 11, 2012 at 10:10 am
I will say that we have made some improvements to the plugin recently (in 3.1.28) that may allow something like this to be possible. But there would still be no way to track individual payments, unless we created another table to do so.
Here is what one of our developers is saying about this:
- Attendees register for an event and pay a deposit (which requires new field in event table and/or pricing table)
- They pay the deposit online using any of the available payment options
- They get sent payment reminders on a monthly basis, which contains a link to an online payment page (a new page we would have to create)
- The new page allows them to set amount of payment and choose payment option (like the regular registration process)
- Payment reminders continue until payment in full is received, at which point their payment status and registration is complete
So it’s a good chunk of change to implement, but I don’t think it’s impossible. Are there other aspects you know of that we are overlooking? I think it’s not too difficult to implement as long as we don’t start getting into building a big admin section to handle tracking all of the data.
This will take about a week of full time work for ONE of our developers, plus testing. And we will have to stop working on other major projects (like Event Espresso 3.2) to get this done. Would either of you be interested in sponsoring the development for this?
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Wesley McDermott
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October 12, 2012 at 6:05 am
I think the features/steps the developer is talking about are pretty much what’s needed for me anyway, perhaps the payment page which you need to create, would request the attendee enter their registration ID/email etc. and the amount outstanding is shown? Instead of them entering an amount manually…
Another feature that’s important is the removal of the deposit option when the event is in it’s last month. ie. if the event is starting at the end of October, the deposit payment option should be removed automatically on an event that included it previously. I have over 50 events listed at the moment, so keeping up to speed with the dates of these events and when they end would take manual checks every day.
Also, I was looking at a few alternative events plugins and I noticed WP Events Manager offers a partial payment option. I’m not sure how all that works though so you might want to test it out. – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/events-manager/
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adenham
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October 17, 2012 at 10:34 am
Hello,
Here’s a use-case I have been asked to implement for a Client.
They currently use EE to book training courses on their web site. They are using both the recurring events facility as well as duplicating events to enter their 4 day courses into the system. They also had on some weeks 1 day courses. Each course being an event in EE.
They are a start-up, were crowd funded and up until now all courses have been booked without payment by making the booking pages subscriber-only and events member-only and then importing the backers from a spreadsheet using a csv import plugin. We were able to use the csv import plugin to fill in the custom user field that event espresso uses (address/phone number fields etc.) and email the backers randomly generated passwords. They were imported in batches and invited to book their course that they paid for via their crowd funding pledges.
All backers are now booked in and so future courses need to be opened up to the public.
Their courses are in the region of £600 and therefore want to offer up to 8 weeks before the course starts an option to pay a £250 deposit for the course. They will use PayPal as the payment gateway. If the course starts within 8 weeks the the deposit option shouldn’t be available.
Automatic email reminders would be useful, we hadn’t discussed this actually but as long as they could easily see who had not paid fully for their course they would be able to manually chase them up. They are using the Calendar plugin to quickly see who is booked in when because I customised it for admin users to show the attendee name, phone number and email in the roll-overs.
Is this a feature planned for 3.2 or is it further in the future than that?
Thanks
P.S. Posting with the Client’s login as you don’t currently provide logins to developers whose clients have bought license – I have 2 clients with Business licences but I have to post as them! Hope you sort that out soon!
John Van Ham
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This reply was modified 12 years, 2 months ago by
 adenham.
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Joe Faletra
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October 20, 2012 at 7:48 pm
I would like to be able to take deposits as well.
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