He was a dad like any other
The kind that wanted trophies for his son’s soccer team, even if the Winter league was a “no trophy” league. He knew a little about WordPress and wanted to create a solution to capture the customized details for each trophy (Team name, player name, etc). The idea was simple but he couldn’t figure out exactly how he wanted to do it. He tried with Gravity Forms and with WooCommerce, with a product add on extension. He walked away from the idea, and his son never knew because it was a “no trophy” league.
Circling back to the same problem
The second time he thought of the idea, it was for a different purpose, but still felt like the same problem. He was a designer by trade, and wanted to sell customized logo work to customers. He also knew he wanted a quick and clean checkout process, and he wanted to be paid up front. When most people use an extension like the product add-on, what they inadvertently do is to create more barriers to conversion. This is because the sale transaction gets paused as people have to fill in form fields with information. He wanted something different.
The solution was simple
When he contacted me on my Clarity account, he asked me if this was even possible. Was there a way to capture the initial order, get paid, and then route them to a page where he could use Gravity Forms to collect the information he needed, which would get emailed to him after the order email hit his inbox. The good news was that there was a simple way. Really simple. It would cost less than $50 to implement on his site. First, he would need to create a digital product, add a price tag and some text describing his logo (or any other kind of) service.
Second, not required, but if he wanted, he could configure WooCommerce to skip the cart page and go straight to check out. That would speed things up. Next, he would need to get the WooCommerce Redirect Thank You extension (for less than $50). He would use this extension to route people to different thank you pages for each kind of service he sold (logo being one of them).
Lastly, on each “thank you” page, he could place a different Gravity Form that collected all the information he needed. For logos, he might ask 5 questions, and for his business card offering, he could collect 10 questions. All after the customer had already paid. I don’t know if he did it, because people never call me back on Clarity to tell me how it went. But I know he ended the call thrilled to know about this approach. For all we know, his son will have a customized soccer trophy next season.