Customer-group deposits for two Italian food stores

The challenge

An Italian food business runs two online stores, selling both to consumers and to business buyers in hospitality (Ho.Re.Ca.) and wholesale. For its business customers it wanted a different payment model: pay a deposit online when ordering and settle the rest on delivery.

The stores already offered PayPal, card, bank transfer and cash on delivery, and one used the Journal3 theme with its own checkout. Deposits had to apply only to the right customer groups, at the right percentage, without clashing with existing group discounts or product-level settings.

What we did

• Install on both stores. The client bought our Partial Payment Advanced Pro extension. We customised and installed it on both stores – one on OpenCart 3.0.3.8 with a standard theme, the other on 3.0.4.0 with Journal3 – and supplied a readme.
• Deposits by customer group. We added the ability to enable partial payment for selected customer groups only, so consumers check out as normal while business groups pay a deposit.
• Per-group settings. A second phase added a settings tab per customer group with its own deposit percentage, and a flag to ignore product-level partial amounts when a group discount applies. We defined a clear priority order – customer group, then product, then category, then the store default – so the amount due is predictable.
• Checkout and payment options. The deposit is paid online and the balance on delivery, with options to disable particular gateways when partial payment is chosen, plus revised checkout text and order summary.
• Fixes and admin usability. We fixed an error when no groups were selected, made sure group discounts were used in the amount due on delivery, corrected cart amount display and kept admin users on the settings page after saving.
• Ongoing support. Over the following months we answered questions, pointed the client to the Italian language files and supplied an installable OCMOD package for reinstalling the extension.

Tech stack

PHP, MySQL, OpenCart 3, Journal3, OCMOD, OVH hosting