How can I integrate a reservation system with a retail based cart in EE?

Question

We have a client who will be selling:

1. Memberships
2. Merchandise
3. Reservations for classes (prepay)

The classes have different rates based on the course. They are on various days, with limited spaces.

Ideally I would like to go with BrilliantRetail for the memberships/merchandise, and rEEservation for the classes, but I don't think there is an easy solution for integrating the two, in order to have a single checkout.

Has anyone managed to pull something like this off or have any ideas of what the best approach would be?

Answer 1

Cartthrob would be the way forward in my eyes. You'd have everything you need (after a few addons are bought). For the events, I'd go with Low Events and set it up in CT as a product channel. You could the use inventory like ticket/seats.

Channels - merchandise, standard CT products - membership, CT subscriptions. Re-billing is quite straightforward etc - events, product channel with low events

I've only used brilliant retail once, and found it very limiting. Getting the right data out for the clients bookings etc would prob be a pain. I'd also check out the docs for rEEservations as I avoided using it in the past because it too is quite limiting.

Sounds like a good project! Good luck with it.

Answer 2

We are replacing a very faulty Magento store with BR for the exact same purpose. We sell Insurance Education courses, online and classroom. We store the courses as products and of course we have had to make a whole lot of modifications to make our stuff work due to the unique nature of our business but it should work out of the box for you unless you need some extra processing.

One of our requirements was to synchronize membership with our Oracle DB as well as verification for purchases, continuing education, etc. with data on our Oracle system. This required writing several extensions and plugins but we're almost done.

Answer 3

I know this is a bit old, but I'm going to pipe in with a link...

http://withchief.com/blog/expressionengine-selling-tickets-with-cartthrob

I'm just embarking on such a project, except there's likely to be hundreds of "events" - so I'm toying with using a matrix field for product options (with CT) and setting the date, time, location and "facilitator" within a matrix row.