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cjh
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« on: December 29, 2011, 05:54:36 PM » |
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I have a client who owns a small medical training school. I need to find free/inexpensive software that allows students to register and pay online. Does anyone have any good suggestions? The simpler to use, the better.
Thanks.
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MrPhil
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« Reply #1 on: December 30, 2011, 09:35:11 AM » |
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Medical training with online registration and payment? Remind me to avoid your neck of the woods...
I would think that any free e-commerce program could do this easily, e.g., osCommerce. You're selling a service, so you collect payment through PayPal or another low cost 3rd party payment system. The "customer" (registrant) gives their full contact information as part of the sale ("shipping address", which you can rename). You could mail them an enrollment certificate/payment receipt, or email it for them to print and present. Even cheaper payment could be done by requiring that a check be mailed in, or that they pay at the door. It doesn't sound like you want to go through the expense of processing credit cards yourself.
You could also set up an ordinary HTML page with a form for registration information, and get some HTML from PayPal for a "Buy it now" type button. That would be even simpler.
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-= From the ashes shall rise a sooty tern =- |
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cjh
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« Reply #2 on: December 31, 2011, 07:50:46 AM » |
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Thank you for your reply, Mr. Phil.
I guess I don't understand why online registration and payment seem like a bad thing ("remind me to avoid your neck of the woods"). The way they used to do it, students would have to register by mail if they lived out of the area, or go to the office in person. Online registration and payment make things easier for the students and the staff. This is privately-owned school that teaches things like nursing assistant training, home health aide training, etc.
I did create an HTML registration page that then sends the person to another page I made where they can choose which course they're paying for -- there are "add to cart" buttons that take them to the Paypal payment page. Because the school is expanding and offering more courses all the time, I think they need something more professional, with more flexibility. This is the first site I've done that requires payment of any kind, so I'm not very familiar with the available shopping carts. I appreciate the suggestion of osCommerce and will check it out. Thank you for your help.
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MrPhil
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« Reply #3 on: December 31, 2011, 08:39:28 AM » |
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Hey, I was just joking! It seemed a bit strange to have medical "school" arranged in such a manner.
If there are a number of choices, of which more than one can be selected at a time, it sounds like a shopping cart and a choice of payment methods (PayPal, etc., check/money order) would do fine.
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-= From the ashes shall rise a sooty tern =- |
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cjh
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« Reply #4 on: January 04, 2012, 01:38:32 PM » |
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Thanks, Mr. Phil.
I was reading some reviews of osCommerce and, while the older reviews were mostly very positive, the more recent ones were mostly negative. One thing several people complained about was having their carts hacked. Do you know of any other reliable, easy carts I might check into?
As always, I appreciate your responses.
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MrPhil
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« Reply #5 on: January 04, 2012, 04:42:50 PM » |
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Yes, osC has tended to fall behind the times. It's great if you like to tinker with the innards and heavily customize it and take responsibility for security, but if you want something that runs more "out of the box", you might want to look into something else. I had a major falling out with the developers when they refused to label the download of the 3.0.x version as "for developers only". It seems they like to have newbies fall down when they install 3.0.2 rather than 2.3.1 (the production store version).
Somewhere on Wikipedia is a big chart comparing features of various carts. That would be a good starting point to winnow down the selection to two or three free carts, and go from there. There's no need to pay any money for either a cart or (unless you're all thumbs) installation and configuration. Zen Cart (an osC derivative) still gets good press. I haven't looked at Cube Cart in a long time. Don't forget that various CMSs (Joomla, Drupal, WordPress) have shopping cart add-ons, and may be a good choice if you also want site content other than the cart.
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-= From the ashes shall rise a sooty tern =- |
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cjh
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« Reply #6 on: January 13, 2012, 07:21:16 PM » |
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I've been away for awhile and just saw your last post, Mr. Phil. Thanks very much -- you've been a great help.
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