my friend wants to start an online school where they can choose a class, sign up for it and pay.

is there a "package" out there that can do this, or is this a matter of getting a shopping cart and changing "products" into "services", which in this case, is teaching a class?

i've seen what i like from various college sites, where you can browse the class catalog and "add to cart" the classes. but my friend is starting out and doesn't have a University budget. is there anything out there that could do this?

what will happen is that we will need to list out courses and allow people to sign up online, but we need to keep a list of the students and limit it to a class size.

this is slightly different from finding things to buy online like shoes. so the paradigm is slightly different.

anybody have experience with this and can share your stories, that would be awesome.

suggestions are also helpful please.

thanks in advance,
bob

You might check out Booking Plus (http://www.bookingplusinc.com/) to see if they can suit your needs.

I think you may do better to have a custom designed order page built. It would not necessarily have to be a complicated page - it could be simple and more cost effective than some carts.

Are most people going to be signing up for multiple classes, or will most registrants be limited to one type of class?

If registrants are signing up for only one class at a time, then you don't need shopping cart logic, as you could potentially do a one click orderform. You would have to set one up for each course, but if you had a developer create one you could probably modify them for any classes.

Alternatively, if you have users signing up for multiple classes at a time, then you will probably need a cart.

Limiting the number of registrants the same as using any one of a number of carts that use an inventory control module or system. It shouldn't be too hard to setup. You could look at Quikstore.com which I just mentioned in another thread. They have an inventory control module.

If you go the route of having a developer create the site there is probably a relatively simple way to creating an incrementing file to limit registrations.

Even easier, you could run pre-authorizations, and in the event that someone remits payment when the class is full, (before you have had time to update your page to show the class is full), it's a pre-auth which means it's not actually been charged to the card yet - so there should be no merchant fees. You could then contact the registrant an offer an alternative class.

Hi,

I would think that a shopping cart software with an inventory module could work exactly how you would want it to. Once a class is full you could show that it is full when someone tries to sign up for and then that way they could browse your other classes. If someone drops out the shopping cart would just add the item back to the inventory list as available.

The most customization would be done to the language files of the shopping cart itself. Instead of saying "this item is out of stock" it could say "this class is full".