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| Source: http://www.cartedge.com/images/cart_right_image.jpg |
Some time ago, I reviewed the Moodle 2.0 for Business book from Packt Publishing. I also have shared lessons learned from Moodle in Business. Although I saw lots of neat ideas in revisiting these two blog entries, I didn’t find the answer to a question that someone is asking me–What shopping cart solutions are available for Moodle 2.2?
Here are two approaches that an evening of googling has yielded. I don’t know of others. Do you?
- Course Merchant – This really seems to be the hands-down winner. Penny Mondani mentions it in her preso on Moodle for Business, although I didn’t see that until after running across it in the Moodle forums.
- PayPal Plugin
Update 1/17/2012: Here’s the response I received to my question (included below) from Course Merchant; be aware you can contact them directly for pricing information, which they did provide in their response. The initial setup cost was in the $500 ballpark, they did allow for hosted solutions as well and provided other features such as matching the design of the shopping cart to your Moodle site.
Question: Will Course Merchant work for this and be easy to integrate into an existing Moodle 2.2 site running on UbuntuLinux and/or Windows Server(s)?
Response:
Yes. Enrollment duration may be passed to Moodle with different prices assigned to different durations. So, you could set a course at say $100 for 30 days and $150 for 60 days for example. This would pass to Moodle and the student would be unenrolled after this time. We support Moodle 2.2.
They also sent the following information, which I found useful to share with my colleague:
Course Merchant is a professional ecommerce package. It gives your Moodle LMS a
serious and highly capable ecommerce capability that is beyond the means of the normal
Moodle enrolment plug-ins to provide.
Multiple Purchases in One Transaction
Allow a shopper to browse your store and purchase more than one course. Course
Merchant uses a standard ‘Add to Cart’ function instantly recognisable to all online
shoppers. Shoppers ‘checkout’ when ready.
Multiple Seat Purchasing
Allow the purchase of more than one course seat in a single transaction. Typical
corporate purchasers of elearning want to buy course seats in bulk. With Course
Merchant, they can.
Multiple Seat License Management
Having sold 5,000 seats, you need a means to manage the licenses, right? With Course
Merchant’s Storeadmin you can access a complete seat management utility – allocate
seats, send login emails, and watch a customer’s seat allocation count down.
Corporate Purchasing Options
Allow customers to check out with Purchase Orders (payment on invoice) as well as by
online payments like PayPal or credit card. Set Course Merchant to ‘defer’ the enrolment
on these payment types. Once these payments have been approved, verified or paid by
check – login to Storeadmin and click ‘Approve Order’ – then watch Course Merchant run
the Moodle enrolment.
Discounts, Coupons, Vouchers and More!
- Setup simple multi-buy discounts with Course Merchant. E.g. spend more than $1,000 and receive a 10% discount.
- Setup banded multi-buy discounts with Course Merchant. E.g. buy between 2 and 99 seats and receive a 15% discount, buy between 100 and 199 seats and receive a 20% discount, and so on!
- Setup expiring voucher/coupon codes with Course Merchant. E.g. display a voucher code in an email marketing campaign – the voucher to be used by December 2012 to receive a preset value or percentage discount.
- Create discounts by web address. E.g. send a specific group of prospects a particular URL which when accessed will immediately allow checkout with a preset percentage discount. Great for ‘membership’ discounts.
- Bundle multiple Moodle courses into one Course Merchant product – a simple solution for allowing students to auto-enrol on multiple Moodle courses with a simple one-time transaction.
Generate Buy Now Button Code
- Use the Course Merchant button generator to create HTML code or simple ‘Buy Now’ links that can be pasted into emails, other websites, Facebook, WordPress – you name it!
- You’re not restricted to selling simply from your catalog.
Enable Seat Limitations
Set inventory values on your Course Merchant courses – essential if selling face-to-face
courses, and useful for certain types of online course.
Use Your Choice of Credit Card Payment Gateway
Course Merchant supports an ever growing list of the most popular payment gateways
from around the world. This includes PayPal Standard, Payments Pro and Express as
well as Google Checkouts. Full support for the most popular gateways – authorize.net,
WorldPay, SagePay, eWay, InternetSecure, First Data – you name it. Custom
integrations can be made too!
Sell Physical Products
Sell books, CDs, DVDs, T-shirts, Mugs or whatever you like! Course Merchant can sell
these products standalone or as an optional purchase with a course. E.g. Course
normally costs $100 or $125 with the optional hardcopy teaching notes.
Sell Face-to-Face Courses
Use Course Merchant to sell face-to-face courses! Use the options capability to offer a
choice of campus location, or maybe a choice of start date and time. Or use Course
Merchant to sell an optional face-to-face workshop add-on to an online course.
Sell Courses by Duration
Set a course duration in number of days and have Moodle unenrol the student at the
correct time. Charge differing amounts for the length of course (e.g. $100 for 30 days,
$175 for 60 days).
Sell Combined Courses
Set a single Course Merchant product item in the catalog to auto-enrol a student into
more than one Moodle course.
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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure
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