Shopping Cart Question

[Karnul]

A friend is about to launch a management software solution for business owners in the trucking industry.

When his customers add trucks into the software he would like their monthly billing to change. Let's say 5 trucks cost $100/month and each additional truck costs $10. If someone adds a 6th truck - how would you guys handle the change in monthly billing?

Can Paypal handle something like this? Or a commercial shopping cart? Or some custom PHP?

 

[aim]

Yes, yes and yes. You can purchase a commercial shopping cart application, however in most cases you'll still need some sort of merchant account to process transactions. If you have a merchant account with someone else you could programatically handle it on your end and setup some sort of a cron job to bill customers as needed (php) or just setup a custom billing arragenement with PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_subscr-intro-outside

 

[TonyCafaro]

Lets take another approach:

The company spends the $100; they know they're going to add another truck eventually, so why not break your software into tiers.

Platform 1 holds 5 trucks = $100
Platform 2 holds up to 10 trucks = $150
Platform 3 is for the major industry players unlimited trucks = $800

The mid size company might only add 1 or all 5 additional trucks, but now they're paying for all of them. Someone adds 5 trucks pays the extra $50 upfront and you're right where you would have been. Now a company only adds 2 you upsold your stock 20% that you wouldn't have had.

 

[ubaidabcd]

If you need a shopping cart, www.zencart.com is free open source

 

[John]

Lets take another approach:

The company spends the $100; they know they're going to add another truck eventually, so why not break your software into tiers.

Platform 1 holds 5 trucks = $100
Platform 2 holds up to 10 trucks = $150
Platform 3 is for the major industry players unlimited trucks = $800

The mid size company might only add 1 or all 5 additional trucks, but now they're paying for all of them. Someone adds 5 trucks pays the extra $50 upfront and you're right where you would have been. Now a company only adds 2 you upsold your stock 20% that you wouldn't have had.

Good thinking

 

[Karnul]

I suggested the tier approach - he didn't like it.

Too many tiers. His customers will range from 1 truck to hundreds.