CMExtension is pleased to announce the release of CMLiveDeal 1.8.2 Stable.
This version provides some bug fixes and improvements:
- In back-end's coupon form, user is not required any more, this gives you ability to create a manual coupon which are claimed by guests.
- Fixed bug in search module.
- Fixed wrong redeemed date bug in customer form in front-end.
- Deal detail URL in merchant's deal list now uses deal detail menu item instead of using deal list menu item.
- Fixed Javascript error when deal title had double quotes.
- Fixed Falang incompatibility in category module and search module.
- Fixed broken HTML layout in deal list.
New payment system
We received many questions and feature requests for a way to require customer to pay in order to receive coupon in CMLiveDeal. This feature is currently not availabe in CMLiveDeal because CMLiveDeal is used to provide free coupons, but we will change that. We will add a payment system to CMLiveDeal to allow site owner earns money from customers and merchants and also allow merchants to receive payments from customers.
Below is our plans to build this new payment system.
Global option to enable payment system
This new payment system is disabled by default. If you use CMLiveDeal to provide free coupons, you can continue to using it that way. Payment system is optional, it is only available to merchants and customers when you enable it in CMLiveDeal's configuration.
2 ways to define how much customers need to pay
Merchant is the one who decides how much he wants his customers to pay. There are 2 options:
- Full price: Customer need to pay the full value of deal. For example, if deal's value is $50, customer needs to pay $50 in order to have a coupon of the deal.
- Prepaid: Merchant only requires customer to pay for a small amount of deal value. The rest of the amount is paid when customer comes and redeem coupon. Example: deal value is $50, prepaid value is $10, customer pays $10 to get coupon, customer pays $40 when redeem coupon at merchant.
3 ways to configure who receives customers's payments, site owner or merchant
Site owner can configure who is the one receiving payments from customers. This depends on how site owner wants to earn money from his merchants.
- Merchant receives 100% payment: Merchant get 100% amount of customer's payment, site owners can earn money by selling monthly membership to merchants (you can use the membership components like Membership Pro or Akeeba Subscription.
- Merchant pays for a fee for every payment: Site owner decides how much fee he gets from merchant for every payment customer makes on the site. This fee is a percentage value of payment's amount. For example, if the fee is 5%, deal's value is $50, when customer makes $50 payment $47.5 is sent to merchant and $2.5 is sent to site owner. This is a popular business model nowadays, you can see many ecommerce platforms uses it, like sellfy.com.
- Site owner receives 100% payemnt from customer. Merchant can decide when he wants to widthraw his funds from the site (weekly or monthly), the funds he receives are subtracted by a fee. Example: if the fee is 5% and customer pays $50, then merchant only receives $47.5 from the site, site owner keeps $2.5.
Supported payment gateways and technical requirements
We will integrate PayPal first because it is a powerful payment gateway which supports all the cases of payments above.
- PayPal Payment Standard: used when customer pays 100% payment to merchant.
- PayPal Chained Payment (Adaptive Payment): used when customer pays 100% value of deal but site owner keeps a small fee. This requires site owner to create a PayPal application and submit to PayPal for review.
- PayPal Mass Payment: used by site owner to send payments to merchants weekly or monthly.
cURL is required on server. It is used to send requests from the site to PayPal. Cron job is required to run schedule payments to send funds to merchants.
If you have any questions or suggestions for this payment system, please feel free to send email directly to us or comment in the forum. We will start building this payment system and it will be available in the next release of CMLiveDeal.
Thank you for reporting bugs in 1.8.1 and giving us ideas for payment system!