I Need Customer To Pay Half Now Half Later

[TesterServers]

Hello,

I sell products that take 4-5 months for delivery and I was wanting to give the customer the option of paying half up front and then the other half once the item arrives.... along with the option of simply paying for it all at once.

Any help appreciated!


Thanks

[DrByte]

Zen Cart v1.x.x isn't designed to handle "partial payments". It always deals with collecting complete payment based on the product's price as offered in the store.

To handy ANY workaround to collect a partial payment, you'll have to be SURE that you COMPLETELY understand that it'll be ENTIRELY up to YOU to manually collect the final payment from the customer, completely SEPARATE from Zen Cart, because Zen Cart will not be able to "charge" the customer for a secondary payment.

That said, possible workarounds include:
a) price your product at half the actual price (yes, that might create confusion, so I suspect you'll not want to do that)
b) price your product by using attributes:
-- i) pay full price up-front
-- ii) pay deposit of half up-front and pay balance upon delivery (and then you'll set the attribute to subtract an amount equal to 50% of the product price)
c) write extensive customizations to the software to handle different preferences

With scenario B, I'd do it like this:
- product price is $350, and be sure to set the "Priced by Attributes" to Yes in your admin
- then add one Option Name of something like "Deposit Method"
- and two Option Names: "Prepaid in Full" and "Two payments: half now, half at delivery"
- then assign the attributes to the product:
-- the "prepaid" will not require any pricing differences
-- the "two payments" one will need you to set the attribute price to "-" and $175 ... so that it subtracts 175 from the price paid at checkout

And then when the product is ready for delivery, you'll contact the customer to make separate payment arrangements.
The only involvement Zen Cart would have with respect to the 2nd payment is when *you* manually go into that order in your Admin and update the order's status with a note saying you've collected the 2nd payment and that you're shipping the item. Zen Cart will NOT see/show any changes in the price on the order, so it will NOT be a complete record of the payment made on that order, so cannot be used as your accounting system (nor is it intended to be accounting software anyway). And Zen Cart will only apply taxes to whatever price Zen Cart collects payment for. So you'll need to handle taxes separately when you collect the 2nd payment, also.

[TesterServers]

Thank you very much DrByte!

Your reply was super fast. I didn't even get a chance to browse my other websites before my phone emailed me with your reply...LOL..

The information you provided is very well understandable to me and I know exactly what you've explained. I'll set it up as above, Like option "B", and then when they item arrives, I'll send them an invoice through PayPal. Problem Solved!!


Thanks alot for your speedy and thorough reply.

TesterServers

[vickichiki]

you could always use the installment plan mod and just adjust it to suit yourself and is perfect if you are able to process CC's offline http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?ma...roducts_id=588

[SPH]

My sister's site does layaways. The way she collects the remaining payments (could be one or more) is to set up a "Product" for only that customer, and the customer makes a payment when ready, within the agreement.

[shelly2bit]

Hi SPH

this is exactly what i need. my site is going to be selling holidays so need deposit paid now and balance six weeks before. I don't want to collect any payments manually though.

When you say your sister has a product just for that customer, would you mind explaining how she does this please? Is it manual? Does the customer log back in later and pay online.

would be grateful for any help.

thanks
michelle