Convention Membership sales: advice please?

Hi there. I am on staff for a yearly convention.

We are trying to find an easier method to sell such memberships online -- right now, people have to send an email to us and then click on the paypal link and send us the right amount of money, which doesn't always function very well for a whole host of reasons.

I'd like to use zencart (the best of the three carts available as installs from our webhost). However, what I need from the cart I choose is that it must be able to take an order for, say, 3 adult and 2 child memberships, then pop up a separate registration form for each membership to take full info (name, address, badge name, etc.) (often extended families and/or friends buy together). We also need to institute a group discount, though I've seen much more info on that so I should be able to research that separately.

All membership purchases will then be prompted either to go to paypal to pay or to print out their checkout page to mail with their manual payment. We can use a confirmation code to link each payment (paypal or physical) to their actual registration info, to release it to the membership database, so that shouldn't be a big deal; mostly what we need is that ability to take separate info for each individual membership purchased and to store it comfortably in a database so we can eliminate most of the data entry from our end, as we're a not-for-profit, all-volunteer organization and it would be better if our staff could spend time on the things the members can't do.

Thank you all for any advice and suggestions you can provide!

I didn't go so far as to do "separates" for each individual... here's what I'm using. Maybe set the thing without a quantity box... I dunno...

http://www.woundcareconference.com

I took a quick look at that, but I need a setup where each individual's info can be entered separately.

We get a lot of extended families and college students and other peer groups who register together, either to take advantage of group discounts or because some of them don't have paypal accts or credit cards, or for other reasons, so we need to be able to get separate info for each membership ordered, and we need all of this info up front because we need to populate our database and pre-prepare registration materials for each individual, which includes badges, etc., before the actual convention.

hopes that someone out there will know how to do this or will be able to point to an add-on or another cart that will do a better job with this particular task

What/ how much info do you need?

name/ address?
name/ membership number?
name/ address/ DOB etc?

When you place an order there is a comments text area. This could possible be used for the extra info.

name
badge name
address
a space for any additional info they think we might need

It has occurred to me that I could do this quite easily if there is a customization feature available in ZenCart, as long as it's capable of taking multiple, admin-defined fields.

(Customization as in etching or emroidery or painting defined by the customer -- customized hats, engravings on personal electronics watches etc., and the like.)

I'm going to go start poking the FAQs to see if such a thing exists in ZenCart.

Also take a peek in the downloads section and see if there's any mods that will suit your needs.

I think I've got it!

I set up attributes, then linked them to the product, making all the appropriate ones required, and when I tried to click to purchase without filling in the required info, it gave me a big ol' error message.

Now I just have to go read all the help files on extracting customers' attribute responses from the back end.

Thank you all for advice and allowing me to bounce my lack of ideas until something came through.

Wow! Neat solution. Let us know how it works out. I'm sure there are others who would be interested.

Is your site https://www.lunacon.org?

There may be a way to do this with ZenCart, but you will have a hard time making it collect registration info from each registrant.

Take a look at https://www.joomla.org and an add-on Extension called Attend Events. AE is specifically designed for conference or event registration and collecting money through PayPal.

JOhn ><>

I used to do something like this with Phorm (a form processor), but there must be a way to do it with Zen Cart.

It's easy to sell seats in a convention center with Zen-Cart and limit the number of seats available by setting an inventory qty. That's pretty easy.

The problem comes when you try and get personal information for each member of a group. If family A or company B wants to register 5 people each, you would normally only get personal info on the person paying for the seats unless you set up a dozen or more Text Attributes to get name address, tele, eMail for each person, but you are still limited by the number of text attributes you create.

I've been down this path before, and decided that it was easier to not re-invent the wheel. if you want to collect personal info, you need a program designed to collect it.

If you are not selling other products, Zen-Cart is overkill to sell one product, 300 times, once a year.

Just MHO
JOhn ><>