Partial payments and tiered seller pricing packages for marketplaces

The challenge

An Indian web developer runs several multi-vendor stores and wanted buyers to be able to pay part of an order upfront and settle the balance later. He chose our partial-payment extension, but his stores were far from standard: a custom theme, a third-party one-page checkout, a multi-seller module and Indian payment gateways all had to work with the new payment flow.

Sellers also needed a say. They had to decide whether partial payment applied to their own products, and both buyers and sellers needed to see what was still owed. Later the client wanted sellers to offer services in tiers, in the style of freelance marketplaces, with up to three packages per product that buyers could compare before adding one to the cart.

What we did

• Partial payments on a custom checkout. We supplied extension builds for two platform versions, tested them on the client's development store, and adapted the flow to his custom theme and one-page checkout.
• Gateway compatibility. We made the partial-payment flow work with Razorpay, and later, on a second store running an older platform version, with Instamojo, confirming that checkout hands over to the gateway correctly.
• Seller controls and reminders. Sellers can switch partial payment on for their own products. Buyer and seller order histories in the multi-seller panels show the pending amount, with email reminders, and we corrected the payment-received date in seller order history.
• Tiered pricing packages. In the seller panel, sellers can create up to three packages (Basic, Standard and Premium) with unlimited feature rows added via AJAX. The product page shows the packages side by side and adds the selected package to the cart.
• Delivery and live support. We delivered the changed files with the database update, fixed a seller product-form error and a required-option add-to-cart issue, and made the packages work on the client's live store copy.

Tech stack

PHP, MySQL, OpenCart 2.1.0.1, 2.3.0.2 and 3.x, vQmod, JavaScript/AJAX, Razorpay, Instamojo