Re: I Need Customer To Pay Half Now Half Later
Originally Posted by
DrByte
There's no "built in" way to "assign a product to just one customer". It doesn't work that way. There might be addons that offer that, but I've not used them.
You could consider setting up a product whose price is $1.00 and let the customer enter a quantity to indicate how much they want to pay. So for $43 they'd by 43 of the $1 product. The product would be visible to all customers, but there's not really anything wrong with that. In fact that's the approach very often used for donations.
This is exactly how we handle it. We do a fair number of orders that require one-off customisation not accounted for in the standard product offering. Initially we created an active item in a non-displaying category that said "Custom Order for Dr. Byte" quantity of 1, and set the price to whatever we had quoted for the custom project. Creating new products became a bit of a hassle, so we created a $1 custom order "product," and it has been so much easier. While anyone can order the product, the product description clearly states it is to be used only for custom orders for which the client already has a quote from us. Also, like our first attempt, this item is in a "hidden" category, so it isn't easy for a potential customer to find it. Quantity for this by the way, should be set very high, as you go through the "items" quickly. Note too that this item messes up some of your pretty analytics reports because it may look like you've sold 4000 of this item, when in reality you've sold (20) $200 items. Small price to pay though for easier administration.
We have also tried to use this for a lay-by/lay-away payment plan, but we can't seem to explain this in a way that customers can follow. As a work-around, our lay-by explanation page says that they should act as if they are doing a bank transfer (which saves the items they want ordered) and then we send them a payment schedule with payment options. They can use any of our payments (bank transfer, paypal, or credit card), however unfortunately all have to be manually reconciled. We also have an order status of lay-by that we use internally to alert staff that payment is not complete.
Wish the lay-by was easier . . . working on another solution, will keep you posted if we make any progress!
Sean M - Sydney, Australia
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