Course booking with deposits, and recovery of restaurant ordering sites

The challenge

A French group running travel brands and a tourism-training school sells its training sessions online through an e-commerce store. Selling courses through a shop built for physical products raises practical problems. Customers choosing a session date could pick any day on a standard calendar, even when no training was running. Prices for course options were not visible all the way through the order, so customers and staff could not see clearly what each option cost in the cart, at checkout or in confirmation emails. Many customers pay a deposit rather than the full amount, and the minimum order total for deposit payments was not behaving correctly.

The same client also builds and hosts ordering websites for restaurants. In 2016 two of those sites stopped working, the owners could not log in to the back office, and one restaurant's site had just been moved to a new server.

What we did

• Availability-aware date picker. We added a date option whose calendar only offers days on which training is actually available, on both the main training site and its companion travel-courses site.
• Option pricing throughout the order. We changed the cart, checkout, order confirmation and email templates so the price of each selected option is shown separately.
• Deposit payments. Using our partial payment module, we corrected the minimum order total that applies to deposits and added a deposit column to the admin order list so staff can see what has been paid.
• Restaurant site recovery. We brought both restaurant ordering sites back online, fixed image manager and module errors, and reset the admin logins directly in the database.
• Server move. After one restaurant's store and database moved to a new server, we found and corrected the configuration settings that were still pointing to the old setup.

Tech stack

PHP, MySQL, OpenCart 1.5, vQmod, GSP partial payment module, email template extension