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taylorphoto
VP-CART New User
USA
53 Posts |
 Posted - September 08 2004 : 12:15:37
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Maybo most people don't need to maintain a running customer balance but it can greatly boost sales by allowing customers to prepay for services/products or purchase products and pay later.
If vpasp implemented a systme such as this clients can make deposits for services such as (attorney fees, photographer retainers, etc) The prepaid amounts would be held in their record and they could purchase against that amount at a later date.
Allowing the merchant to click a box in the customer record could indicate if the customer has the ability to purchase on credit or must pay at time of order.
Prepaid clients could be associated with a "gift cerificate" type table that maintained record of their balance and deducted from it as they purchase items or adds to it as they make payments.
I realize this would be a MAJOR upgrade but I have searched and found virtually none of this capability on the internet at this time. The few who are providing this type of capability are chargin an arm & a leg for it.
This would place VPASP at the front of the curve in internet ecommerce and accounting instead of simply providing functions to "match" others who had functions first.
It would also open up their appeal to people who provide services instead of products. Attorneys could accept retainers online, dentists could maintain your account balance online and you could make payments to your account, etc.
I would be interested to know what others think of this idea.
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devshb
Senior Member
United Kingdom
1904 Posts |
Posted - September 08 2004 : 12:49:18
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one way of doing this could be to use vpasp's gift-certificates and just rename the text "vouchers" or "deposits" instead, as people can buy any denomination of gift-certificate through the normal order/payment processes.
but, like you say, this doesn't allow a higher level running balance, and instead will just create separate vouchers for each amount bought.
what you'd really need is to be able to buy such "vouchers" but to also have the system create a higher-level voucher which sums up all your outstanding/unused voucher amounts, then automatically use that parent voucher whenever ordering and not let people use the individual vouchers, then make the order process delete+recreate the parent voucher again after each order.
Simon Barnaby
Developer
[email protected]
www.BigYellowZone.com
Web Design, Online Marketing and VPASP addons |
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