Shop with request payment

I have been asked to help a friend of a friend set up a shopping/payment system on their Wordpress site

It is a dance business and they want a store front so people can pay for a taster class, one off lesson or products and a way to accept payments for invoices. The invoices are managed on a separate piece of software and currently parents bring in cheques every term.

I played with paypal request payment a few years ago which would work but does anyone know of a shop front plugin that will also accept a request for payment. I have found a few stand alone options but it seems a waste to have two different systems.
The way I see it working is the parent is emailed an invoice and they then login and pay the invoice using the reference number.

Edit: I have just found “Manual order creation” by accident on the Shopify website after spending about 15 min going round and searching their site.

Going off subject a bit I am always unsure of websites that are not maintained properly. If the company does not maintain their website properly how much care are they putting into their product?

Anyway the shopify UK prices page has the plan prices with a $ sign instead of a ÂŁ sign although the breakdown of costs is in pounds :rolleyes:

Edit: I suppose they are a USA company and the payment goes through to America and they have fixed the amount in $ rather than different values for different countries?

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What about WooCommerce? I’ve not used it myself, but see it pop up in lots of places. It also got good documentation.

Here’s something on the pricing.

I can not see a way to make a “request for payment”/“Manual order” creation on the WooCommerce site. But it does have a subscription extension that may be useful so I will check it out further.

It is always back to the same problem; one site/software offers one thing you want but not the second and another site does it the other way around!

Orders can be added manually in Woocommerce. Go to the Orders screen in the back end and there’s an Add Order button.

For request payment, you can use the Cash on Delivery type - just change the wording on it to Pay Later or something similar. You can then attach an email response for that payment type which gives the customer instructions how to pay. It also allows Direct Bank transfer - the email response to this sends the account details to use. When you confirm payment either way, you can update the order in the back end to complete

Woocommerce is a very big, powerful plugin that can do many things, but if it doesn’t do what you want it to do, it has many extensions (not all free) that do just about anything a person would want. Try searching on their website if the basic plugin is not sufficient.

Thank you for the information; it is problem sometimes digging down to find what you want and what it is called in the first place.

The pricing can also be confusing and I did not realise woocommerce is free and then I noticed this on a website:

Time

Never underestimate this factor. Setting everything up and maintaining just the system itself will cost you quite a lot of a time. Ecommerce solutions like Shopify or Bigcommerce don’t require any installation and will handle updates for you in the background, so you can completely focus on your business.

Estimated costs: headaches

I did have a go at an ecommerce CMS a few years ago and it was a bit of a headache; every time I thought I had it all setup something else came along! It took quite a few hours to setup and that was without modifying the theme.

Anyway I will try a couple out later and discuss it with the site owner. From what I understand ownwer is not very computer savvy and so will probably go with the easiest option; even if it costs more.
The shopify “will handle updates” looks good as I do not want them ignoring any updates.

There’s always a trade off of time vs control so often it comes down to cost. Sometimes it can be an investment to learn a system if you intend to use it on further projects so the long term result is worth the initial pain. I have a couple of sites running Woocommerce but I have a pretty thorough understanding of it. Feel free to drop me a message if you have any questions about it and best of luck with whichever solution you decide on

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I think I will install a local version of Wordpress and woocomerce and see how it goes as some thought is required for what I actually need and how to go about it.

Thank you for the offer @therealpaulhaley I will like take you up on your offer once I have a setup running.

First schoolboy error: I installed Wordpress and then Woocommerce and after a couple of hours playing with Woocommerce I realised it had taken over the Wordpress site. I now have a shopping site whereas I wanted a site with a shop :unamused:

It seems you need two Wordpress installs and the second goes in a sub folder with Woocommerce.

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You can actually add page templates for the site that are not connected to the shop part, so that you end up with mainly a website that has a shop. These page templates do not need to be related to the pages that Woocommerce creates by default when it is installed.

Ah that sound better as two installs of Wordpress will take up a lot of space.

I did add another page to the woocommerce site as a test but the problem was I still had basket, account etc. taking up all the navigation bar on the main page. I would not need these unless I was in the shop section. I will have to have a look around for a way to get what I want. All I found when looking before was to have woocommerce in a sub directory of a second wordpress install.

Do you use custom menus, or is this a ready-made template that you are using? You should be able to remove those items from the navigation bar that you don’t want to use.

Also, there are ways of modifying Woocommerce if you are willing to go there.

I am currently using the standard Woocommerce template ( storefront below ) as I selected that option in the setup as I assumed it would be easier. It must have overwritten the standard Wordpress template.

The main site template is a custom template and I was just going to add another link to the shop.

I am going to have to think this through as the owner wants to keep their original layout which meand the two install of Wordpress are starting to make sense. I can keep the original site and just link to the store.

I would not select that option, but just make sure that the original theme is compatible with Woocommerce (https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/third-party-custom-theme-compatibility/). I did one site like that and it worked well.

If you are okay with changing the theme you are using, there are many Woocommerce-compatible themes out there, some of which are free, that might have the look you want, and then you won’t have to worry about adjusting your theme.

Just been looking at the website source and I think it is a Jupiter theme and according to the site where it might have come from it is Woocommerce ready.
Also I found this in the source code so I should be OK:

(‘/wp-content/themes/jupiter/assets/stylesheet/fonts/woocommerce/font.eot’);
There are other similar references to Woocommerce

I only hope that the theme is registered to the owner and not the web designers.

Should have checked the source code earlier.

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