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Taking a Deposit for Out Of Stock Items

Feature Requests
#1

What method do other websites current use (if any) for taking a deposit from customers through the website where the balance would be paid later?

In our case this is particularly issue with products which are recently announced or in very short supply, and therefore we cannot necessarily supply them within the 28 days while a card payment authorisation remain valid (we use delayed settlement with out gateway so that the charge is only applied to a customer’s card at the moment when it is rung through the till with GWO).

Our work-around so far has been to create specific dummy products in a couple of cases, where a customer can pay a significant (but reduced) amount which we settle through GWO, and in our POS this is dummy product is manually changed to the full-price item where the payment becomes a deposit against a layaway.

Has anyone else come up with a different way of accomplishing this which works simply?

Are any other clients interesting in collaborating on a customisation to make an automated deposit / part-payment system part of the Nitrosell platform?

#2

For an idea of how I would see such a system suiting our requirements (with an eye to wider application for other clients too), here would be my suggested functionality:

  • Option to part-pay only appears on “Out of Stock” items (could be a configuration choice, or switched on product-by-product via a PAM attribute, if that suited other collaborators)
  • Option to part-pay only appears if price is over a certain threshold (with the value set via a config attribute when switching on the functionality)
  • Amount of part-payment would be a specific percentage of the item price (set via a config attribute ?)
  • Amount of part-payment would be rounded to the nearest €10 (or €1 / €5 if that suited other collaborators) to make calculating the balance easier at a later date
  • The part-payment option would appear as a separate “pay deposit” button after the normal “add to cart” button
  • Throughout the checkout and when pulled through GWO into the relevant POS the product price(s) would remain at the full value, with a clear “remaining balance owed” value displayed on screen / in the confirmation email.
  • The gap between full transaction value and the lower amount tendered through GWO would require conversion to a layaway (possibly by manual intervention, unless the transaction type can be set programmatically) with the order deposit value set to match the value tendered (either manually or automatically depending on what is possible programmatically in different integrated systems).

Hope the above all makes sense to anyone interested in collaborating?

Regards, Gareth