Payment related Project, opinions, hints, all much appreciated

[olafgleba]

Hi,

for a client project i am evaluating whether to implement this with Processwire (preferred of course ;-)) or if something else fits better. I have no experience with Payment Workflows in conjunction with Processwire so far.

Project summary:

There are large number of (small) Children Art Schools. They all offers workshops on there Websites (online/offline). These websites are built with partly unknown CM-Systems. To date some of them has a simple registration form (payment offline per invoice only), while some only even have a Registration PDF to Download. Billing and chargeback issues bothers them a lot because the lack of staff ressources.

Planned is a stand-alone Registration Portal for all Art Schools. While the offers still being part of their websites (some kind of, s. below), the registration process should be delegated to the Portal. Therefore every offer just has a correponding link to the Registration Portal. Payment is a obligatory part of the registration process.

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Portal features:

Backend:
- Each Art School has a separate, isolated Account to maintain their offers, invoices and customer records
- Each Account (e.g. each Art School) creates their offers in the backend, these entries are shown in the Frontend of the Registration Portal (kind of duplication as offers also exists within the Clients Websites, but required to not interfere with the Art School Websites' CM-Systems, reason s. above)

Frontend:
- Nothing fancy: Listing of workshops, filter by Art Schools, categories, search form

Process:
- Each registration record have to be bounded to the corresponding Account(s. above)
- In conjunction with sending some mails, each registration record must be saved in a customer tree/table/page to hold the customer data, provided by the registration form.

Payment:
- A Payment Provider must be integrated to provide digital payment options (credit card, debit a.s.o.) and secure transactions

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So at first sight these are not any very complex needs. But while i try to collect as much infos as possible, i am increasingly unsure which way is a reliable way to do it.

I heard from Padloper. And read the (work in progress) documentation. I am not sure the project requires a full store with cart though. And there is the Stripe Payment Processor for FormBuilder/Stripe payments Inputfield for FormBuilder, for example.

I understand the difference between the padloper and FomBuilder approach, still i speculate which approach is suitable for the project needs.

Most of the time i have rather strong opinions how to do things. But here i get a bit lost. Because i didn't have those requirements in a project so far.

So, any hint, suggestion or insight surely will help me a lot to make appropriate decisions.

Many thanks in advance,
Olaf

[rick]

Hello @olafgleba ,

What a fun project to work on.

Reading through your post a couple of times it is clear you have everything under control, but simply have a question about processing payments for this parent (registration) -> child (art schools) relationship.

First, I have no experience with padloper or formbuilder to say whether they can handle multiple vendors with multiple products. I'll leave that for the more experienced members.

Lastly, I would contact stripe support and ask them the best means to handle multiple merchant accounts from a single URL (registration). This is where I think issues will arise. Normally you would define a single URL in the merchant account setup. But your solution would mean that you (registration) would also provide one or more merchant ids for each transaction. Stripe support will be able to answer that.

I hope this helps. Also, keep us posted on this project (if allowed).

[olafgleba]

8 minutes ago, rick said:

Lastly, I would contact stripe support and ask them the best means to handle multiple merchant accounts from a single URL (registration). This is where I think issues will arise. Normally you would define a single URL in the merchant account setup. But your solution would mean that you (registration) would also provide one or more merchant ids for each transaction. Stripe support will be able to answer that.

That's a fine hint. Thank you @rick.

[olafgleba]

Just for the ones who has this on their list,- sadly the client chooses some other agency to build this. The way the decisions was communicated and for what reason was a bit odd. But not uncommon when dealing with public institutions, i am afraid.

[bernhard]

Sad to hear that @olafgleba

9 hours ago, olafgleba said:

The way the decisions was communicated and for what reason was a bit odd.

Did they find a wordpress plugin for it? *scnr

Jokes aside I'd be very curious to hear that oddity if it's nothing secret 🙂 

[olafgleba]

If the head of the "Landeskulturamt" is related to someone who is related to someone a.s.o., the mandatory selection process sometimes is just pro forma 😒. As always, it is just a bit annoying to notice that after putting much time and effort in.

But some of my research for this project will become handy in scheduled projects 😏.