Customisation of Checkout system for alternative site

[buzzmonkey]

Hi Everyone,

I'm new here so go easy on me!

I am reasonably experience with MySQL/PHP/HTML/CSS however at the present time Zen Cart seems to be confunded me over a particular issue, hopefully I can get some good help for here.

The company I work for wish to setup an online "buyback" site for mobile phones, similar to Mazuma Mobile (Here)

We have completed 90% of the site but the final part which is confusing is setting up the payment system in such a way that the customer can make a choice between PayPal, Cheque or PayPal and for the corresponding field to show and be filled in (i.e. if PayPal is selected, then the PayPal address text field should show, for bank and cheque the same is applicable) Once this data is entered by the customer it would need to be submitted to the database, most probably within the _orders table.

As mentioned any help would be appreciated, we may also be willing to send this work out freelance.

Regards

BuzzMonkey

[DrByte]

A regular Zen Cart checkout flow already lets the customer choose between available payment options, just as you describe. And, once they complete their payment, the order is saved and their payment choice is stored in the orders table, as you described.

So, what's "custom" about your needs?

[buzzmonkey]

The custom part is where we need to be able to pay the customer for their mobile phone rather than the norm of the customer purchasing a phone from an online store.

Normally these types of sites, have a checkout system where the customer selects one of 3 options PayPal, Bank Transfer or Cheque. Obviously if a customer selected the standard PayPal Module in Zen Cart then they would have to pay us for a phone they are sending to us for us to buy, this is not what we want but the other way round. The customer completes the checkout with the payment method selected with their details inserted into the MySQL database, they then send their phone/s to us, we check them for faults/errors, if they pass verification we then send the money to them via the payment method they selected.

I hope I have explained this in greater detail,

Regards,

[DrByte]

You could write your own custom payment module which presents them with the choice of payment methods and allows them to fill in appropriate address details, which you could then stuff into the order-comments or even the order table upon completion.
Definitely custom coding to do that.