Purchase 'part' of a Product

Posts: 12
Joined: 08/09/2007

I have a site 90% finished using the eCommerce module. Now in the 11th hour the owners want to change it. Our 'products' are actually requests from needy persons for charity, but they operate like a product--you pay $100 and buy the thing.

Now we want to allow people to purchase part of the charity request, so 4 people can each give $25, on different days, and each time the 'meter' goes up 25% showing how much of the whole 'product' has been purchased.

Drupal has this basic thing with the chipin module, but we want the whole thing onsite and customized.

Anyone interested in this? We would consider redoing our store with ubercart to get this.

If no one can do it, at least some pointers how I can try to code this myself would help. Smiling

Thanks!

Posts: 123
Joined: 08/07/2007
Bug FinderGetting busy with the Ubercode.

Will you just have 2 options, the full request, and the 25% request?

Could these be listed as seperate products. You would have one product that is just the full amount, and anoher that is a 'partial product', or would you want them to be the same product?

Posts: 2352
Joined: 08/07/2007
AdministratoreLiTe!

<brainstorming>
Here's an idea. The people seeking the charity would purchase donations for whatever amount is available or they ask for. Then other people coming to the site can browse through the orders and submit payments until the order balance reaches 0 (or not if they want to be even more generous). There'd definitely be some code work to allow users access to orders they didn't make, and to handle different kinds of payments on any one order. I think it'd be feasible though. The biggest challenge might be dealing with the fact that orders are not nodes.
</brainstorming>

Posts: 5617
Joined: 08/07/2007
AdministratorHead Code Monkey - I eat bugs.

Yeah, I don't like the idea of customers being able to browse orders... but I do think you could implement some simple counter for a product node that tracks how much of it has been "bought." Anything you do is going to require plenty of custom code... the only thing I can imagine working at the moment w/o code would be using the inventory API. If you want to raise $100, you could create a $10 product w/ 10 in stock and keep it posted until it gets bought out.

Posts: 11
Joined: 08/09/2007
Cool profile pic award.

I think to call it a product is misleading. This is more of a donation/fundraising issue. Have you looked at CiviCRM (http://civicrm.org)? It might be overkill, but I think it would do what you want.

Alternatively, instead of a single $100 product, you have 100 $1 products (let's call them tickets for now). You'd need to be able to track inventory for that, of course, and to disallow backorders. What you would get would be that you could buy 25 tickets, and then other people would see 75 tickets remaining.

Posts: 12
Joined: 08/09/2007

I know CiviCRM a bit and this is NOT a job for it.

However the ideas of using inventory and selling like 'tickets' for each 'product' are GREAT. I think that will work.

Thank you very much!