Greetings from Lilit and the whole Bang2Joom team. Today, I am privileged to be a guest blogger on PayPlansâ must-read blog. And it feels great. We at Bang2Joom are really happy that we have found an ideal Joomla! extension to make the ecommerce experience for all our Joomla users enjoyable with the help of PayPlans.
How we met PayPlans
As some of you might remember, we were using redSHOP on our old Bang2Joom.com website in order to do ecommerce and sell our extensions. It worked fine till the point where we realized we needed more. We personally think that redSHOP is a great extension especially if you are planning to sell goods online. The idea of subscription which we wanted to add was not fully supported by redSHOP. It did have the following option, but it kind of lacked the features we wanted. Thanks for the great experience with redSHOP we are developing extensions and templates for the redSHOP component for Joomla now.
With a redesign of our website, there came the urgent need to find a new component which will fulfill all the features and options we needed. We had two choices: we were hesitating between Akeeba Subscriptions and PayPlans as they were the leading ones in the Joomla world.
We did not choose Akeeba as we think that it is more logical to use Akeeba if you have a few products with a long history and versioning. We are and will be frequently releasing many Joomla templates and extensions and it did not really suit our needs. More modifications would have been needed. Besides, it had some views which we really did not need with Bang2Joom.com.
Kudos to all Akeeba products and the people developing them! We really value your products.
Our first experience with PayPlans
Eventually, we chose PayPlans. Why?
First of all, we think that a website is a face of a company. We fell in love with the culture of PayPlansâ website. Secondly, after surfing the net and reading the reviews we found out that people, using PayPlans, are really satisfied and happy with it. Then, we got a 6 month free subscription trial.
After the first experience with PayPlans, it turned out to be:
Simple, yet extended
Stable
Bootstrap adjusted
And last but not the least, it had all the views that we needed!
6 months? It took us a few days to realize thatâs what we want. And we got it.
An innovative approach by Bang2Joom
We always strive to add our unique touch in all what we do. This was not an exception. We decided not just simply use the default features of PayPlans - we did some modifications in overrides. We did not touch the core, though.
Our payment system is based on PayPlans, K2 and Phoca Downloads. This perfect trio works miracles for us! K2 shows the product and content page, PayPlans supports the feature to subscribe to/ buy the products and gives the users access to Phoca Downloadâs files. Simple and very effective!
We merged PayPlansâ invoice view, PayPlansâ subscription view and Phoca Downloadâs filesâ download view merged into one view which was our PayPlansâ dashboard view. Thus we solved the problem of user friendliness. Users no longer needed to go clicking around and getting confused and feeling lost. One or two clicks will lead them to actually getting the products they want.
The best thing we like about PayPlans is that it has a lot of integration features with different extensions which are done with the help of all the apps listed in App manager.
Actually, we are thinking about creating an app which will connect B2J Contact to PayPlans. This will allow the web masters to have their desired form on their website which will lead them to a check out page. This will be a great feature for those websites that for instance need a donation option. This is still a thought, but we are really excited about this!
All in all, this is our innovative and unique way of using PayPlans for supporting ecommerce on Bang2Joom.com. And I would like to conclude this blog post by the feedback we got recently on Bang2Joomâs use of PayPlans. Thank you so much, these are the words and things that matter after all.
"The way you have customized PayPlans on your site is really very awesome. I have not seen a more of a creative use!"
