ECheque Tips

PayPal has a system called ‘eCheques’ – basically – they allow payment to come from someone’s bank account if they don’t have a debit / credit card – this can be a good thing, but can also be bad.

From Tournr’s point of view, if you take payment by eCheque – the competitor will not be registered until the cheque has cleared which can take up to 14 days according to PayPal. This is problematic if you take payment on the weekend before your competition and payment hasn’t cleared by the start. Even worse is that the payment doesn’t clear!

Solutions

There are a couple of solutions – the first is to set the last registration date to be 14 days before your competition. This means you can take any form of payment, but does mean your competitors have to be super on it.

The second solution is to not accept eCheques. To do that – you need to go to your PayPal account and click on ‘Seller Preferences’

Once there, click on the ‘update’ button of ‘Block Payments’:

And then select the check box to block eCheques:

Finally – press ‘Save’ and you’re done:

Tournr – Payments Updates

Partly to do the Teams feature addition, and partly to simplify things, the payments setup has been moved to another page, you can get there in a few ways –

One – by selecting ‘Edit payment details’ from the cog in the top right of the page:

Two – pressing the ‘edit’ icon next to the Payment details:

or three, from the normal ‘Edit’ page you can press the ‘Edit the payment details’ button:

When you first get there, you will have the option to make the competition free, or say you want to charge:

Selecting ‘Charge’ will open up a whole new set of options.

Basic Details

Use the notes field as before to put any details in (address for cheques etc) – bear in mind – this is publicly available information, so be careful with what you put there!

PayPal Setup

Selecting ‘I want to use PayPal to take payments’ will provide you with the paypal setup fields, the most important is the email address. NB: I’ve made it so that you can only use PayPal with ‘Register on Payment’ – so you can’t use PayPal buttons anymore.

Individual Entrants Setup

Here you decide whether or not to charge for individual entrant classes. If you do decide to charge, you get the usual options from before:

Additional Items

If you’re adding things like T-Shirts, or meals you can add them here, so they are available for a competitor to select at checkout:

Team Entrants Setup

You can charge entry for teams in one of two ways – firstly by charging for each class entered (as individuals are charged):

Or a single flat rate fee which means one team can enter multiple classes:

Early Bird Prices

Early bird pricing works as before, but you now have the option to set for teams or individuals (or both):

Discount Codes

Discount codes also now have the option to set for Team or Individuals.

Early Bird Prices!

No – don’t worry – Tournr isn’t charging anyone – but what it does now allow is for Organisers to be able to set Early Bird Prices.

Eh?

An early bird price is a price that is lower than the normal full price, it’s a way to get more people to your competition, and earlier.

Ok, how?

As with most things – the Cog is your friend – click on that and select ‘Edit’

Scroll down to the Payment Details Section – (I’m going to make an assumption here that you’ve got payments setup, if not please see the older posts about that)

Just after the settings for the costs you’ll see a new checkbox (Include Early Bird Prices):

If you select this you’ll be able to add as many prices as you want – if you want different prices for each day – go for it!

Like so:

Scroll to the bottom and Save. All done!

What does it do?

You get a new panel showing the Early Bird Prices:

And the ‘Classes’ drop down will reflect the current early bird deal:

New Feature–PayPal Carts!

Up until now, Tournr has let organisers use PayPal for registration costs, so 1 class, 2 classes – all the way to n classes, with an additional class option thrown in for good measure, and that works for a lot of the time. But sometimes you want just a little more, maybe you’re needing to add an ‘Insurance for the day’ type option, or an ‘Extra Meal Ticket’. Tournr didn’t help you with that :( but now – it does!

You can now use a cart based system instead, so you can have as many extra items on as you want, plus the registration costs. How does it work? Let me show you.

The technique is the same for either editing an existing Tournament, or creating a new one, when you’re on the create/edit page, make sure you have the ‘Add payment details’ check box selected:

Then select ‘Use PayPal’

and then select ‘Use a PayPal Cart`:

Now you can start to add Cart Items, as many as you want:

You can add new items by pressing the ‘Add another item’ button, or remove them by pressing the red ‘X’ next to each row. Fill in all the other details as you would for a normal PayPal buy now button (see the previous post if you need help there) and ‘Save’ the competition.

When you scroll down to your new/edited competitions ‘Payment details’ section, you’ll see:

Competitors can add each item to the cart and when ready, ‘View Cart’ to pay.

Tournr Tips #9 – Payment without PayPal

I recently wrote about how to add PayPal to Tournr, but what if you don’t want to use PayPal? Prefer cheques? Prefer BACS? – Of course we can do that!

First things first – we’ve got to be logged in, then let’s head to our tournament and edit it:

Scroll to the ‘Add Payment Details’ section, and select ‘Add payment details’:

Add in your information in the ‘Notes’ field (you can use MarkDown if you want):

Lastly, ensure that the ‘Use PayPal’ check box is left off.

Then press ‘Save’

Then on the tournament page you will have a payment section:

Just a quick couple of tips for formatting the text as above, when editing your text, to get each bit on a new line put 2 spaces at the end of the preceding line. To get italics, surround what you want to be italicised with single ‘*’ characters (like *this*). To get bold, use 2 ‘*’ characters (like **this**).