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impacttennis
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February 25, 2013 at 3:49 pm
I’ve read the various threads (and replies to this) but I want to collect payment at the same time they register. I don’t wat to chase or have to review all incomplete payments. Imagine buying on amazon, you wouldn’t get the goods just by placing the order! 🙂
So – is this possible – can we force register and pay in “one sitting” so to speak?
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Jonathan Wilson
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February 25, 2013 at 4:11 pm
Hi Nick,
There isn’t a way to mandate payment. If you have a payment gateway set up and your event is not Free, then your registrants will be taken to the payment page where they can pay before leaving the page.
Referring to your Amazon comment, if registrants don’t pay, they don’t get in. hehe. 🙂
Seriously though, when an attendee registers for an event — specifically clicks the “register” link, adds their information, confirms and proceeds to the payment process — a record is stored for that attendee. Yes, this happens even if an attendee has not paid — because you may not want to just abandon unpaid registrations when you can, instead, send them a payment reminder to ask for them to complete the registration process (e.g. and pay) at a later date.
However, by default — unless you have changed the default registration status settings — the status of that attendee is INCOMPLETE until payment has been received, unless an event is a FREE event (e.g. the price is set to 0.00). And, also by default — unless you have changed the email settings — no email will be sent to that attendee stating that they have registered if payment is not complete. Incomplete registrations do not count against the total number of available spaces in an event (Complete and Pending registrations do).
Now, it’s possible the registrant never sees the payment page because you have no payment gateways set up. However, even in this case, the attendee would still not be marked complete if payment was not received, unless the event was a free event.
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impacttennis
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February 27, 2013 at 3:48 pm
Thanks Jonathan. I get the point but we have customers registering (with details) and then not completing transaction for a variety of reasons regardless of the fact that the payment g/way is there (Paypal). So the second phase (url/registration) is a two phase approach. Some folks (for whatever reason) don’t like Paypal or just don’t complete (trying it on!) and we are then in manual / chasing / reconciliation mode.
If we could “force” payment as part of registering it would be a lot more efficient.
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Josh
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February 28, 2013 at 8:49 am
Hi Nick,
I can understand what you’re saying. One thing to keep in mind is Event Espresso is built to be flexible enough to allow for later payments (at the door, by check, money order, EFT, invoice). If we made it so that non-paid registrations were deleted from the system each time a payment didn’t complete, this would not work for a majority of use cases.
Here are a few suggestions that may help increase the registration to payment ratio and make the process of paying later automatic:
1) In Event Espresso>General Settings under “Advanced Features” there is an option to “Show payment options for “Pending Payments” on the Payment Overview page?”. You can set this to yes and if the system is sending out email confirmations before payment, you can include the [payment_url] shortcode and they can pay later by clicking through from the email.
2) It may help to set up an on-site payment gateway. Even though there is an option to pay without a PayPal account, PayPay doesn’t make this obvious.
It’s up to you about what you want to do with incomplete registration records. If you’re sensing that these are not really serious registrations and you do not want to chase them down, you could delete them en masse.
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impacttennis
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March 9, 2013 at 2:01 pm
Thanks Josh.
Again, understand your position / view but with a volume environment this is not working very well at the moment.
Will have to consider some alternative solutions.
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Josh
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March 11, 2013 at 11:18 am
Hi Nick,
I highly recommend going with an on-site payment option. That should help with your conversions.
Also, you can filter the admin attendee view by payment status, and select all then delete. This will bulk delete the non-paid attendee records from the system.
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impacttennis
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March 11, 2013 at 3:07 pm
Josh,
Can you clarify what you mean regarding on-site payment? We are using (struggling along) PayPal (another topic)
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Dean
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March 11, 2013 at 11:53 pm
Hi Nick,
Onsite: The user is never taken away from your site, they add all the card details etc whilst still on your site.
Offsite: The user is taken to another website (basic PayPal is a good example here) where they fill everything out and pay and are returned to your site afterwards
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