Professional Vocational Training

We’ve supported Birmingham-based PVT for almost five years now and were recently asked to extend their website to allow clients to pay for courses at the point of application, rather than just registering an interest by filling in a form and being billed later.

We considered implementing a full WooCommerce system which would allow students to add courses to a basket and then check out in the usual ‘e-commerce’ way, but given that most students registered for a single course (or at least one course at a time) and that there was nothing to ‘ship’ as all courses are delivered remotely and virtually, this almost seemed like overkill – we just wanted students to register for a course and make a payment right there from the registration form. Students also needed to have the option of paying a deposit or the full course fees – and this made the standard e-commerce model even less of a good fit.

So instead, we opted to use a fairly new plugin from Ninja Forms, whose base plugin already provided the functionality for the registration form. With a little conditional logic we were able to add a Stripe payment section to the end of the existing registration forms (which could take a deposit or the full course fees) making it very easy for students to sign up and pay in a single action.

The Ninja Forms plugin was a very good fit for this particular business requirement, where PVT had previously been considering a full e-commerce solution. Our approach was simpler for the user, and more cost-effective for our client.

If you’re in a similar situation where you want to take a simple payment and don’t want all the extra bells and whistles which come with a full e-commerce system then do consider whether something like a forms-based payment plugin would be appropriate.

Give us a call and see if we can help.