Sequential order and payment numbers

[Aron Martinez]

Hi,

Is it possible to have nicer, sequential order and payment numbers for bookings performed through Hotel Booking?
Ideally the order and payment numbers should also be separate:

• Not like this: order #1 attached to payment #2, order #3 attached to payment #4, and so on
• But like this: but rather order #1 with payment #1, order #2 with payment #2, etc.

I understand that like WooCommerce, Hotel Booking uses pre-existing WordPress “Post IDs” also used for every other content in WP. This is already very ugly for WooCommmerce orders and 99% of my clients having a traditional eCommerce want to remove this behaviour (in these cases I would simply use a plugin like “WooCommerce Sequential Order Numbers” to bypass this ugly limitation, but unfortunately for Hotel Booking I found no similar workaround).

Is it possible to have separate order numbers for bookings, which are sequential and may have a custom format (it should work in a similar way as provided by the plugin “WooCommerce Sequential Order Numbers” and other similar plugins)?
My clients need sequential order and payment IDs, and need to avoid the actual situation of having two subsequent orders with a “gap” of tens or even hundreds of IDs in between (else, during each yearly tax declaration, there would be an investigation about these misterious “missing” order and payment numbers, which in reality do not exist…).

Thank you in advance for your help and best regards

[Mary Evans]

Hello Aaron,

You are right, whenever a post (post, page, product, order, booking, payment etc.) is created on your website, WordPress automatically assigns a unique id to it. The unique ids are essential for WordPress as they are used to tell apart one post from another.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to change it neither from our nor WordPress settings.
We have not tested any workarounds yet (like the offered third-party plugin), so we cannot guarantee its compatibility.

Best Regards,
M. Evans

[Aron Martinez]

Hi Mary,

Thank you for your feedback.

It is sad that there is no way around this issue. I imagine that this is not a frequent request, but I can also imagine that nice/clean/sequential order numbers would be very appreciated by most users.

As a workaround, I could imagine switching entirely to Woocommerce Payments using it as the only payment gateway (I am currently testing this on a staging environment). This way at least the customer is presented only with a clean “Order number” from WC (using the sequential plugin mentioned before, even if this still means that in the backend we will create even more chaos: ID #1234 for the booking, ID #1236 for the payment and ID #1 for the WC order… [HUGE_FACEPALM]).

This would also have the benefit of allowing me to use other WC related plugins where no Hotel Booking alternative exists for now, like dynamically generated gift cards (the next request by my clients, see an example here: https://woocommerce.com/products/gift-cards/).

On the other hand, this approach also leaves some big questions and issues open, given that the WC payment gateway seems to still not be 100% user friendly and bug-free. Let me list some of the issues I am encountering from my first tests:

1. When booking a room, the visitor must first enter his personal data in the Hotel Booking form, and is presented again with the pre-filled data in the Woocommerce form (“Invoice address”).
   Would it be possible to store the customer data from Hotel Booking as “Shipping address” and have them eventually modify the “Invoice address” of Woocommerce separately (keeping it pre-filled in case the two addresses are the same)?
   This would at least put the double form to some good use and allow to book a room for someone else and have distinct addresses for “Shipment” (the person for which the room is booked) and “Invoicing” (the person paying for the room).
   NB: right now in the WC order, the Shipping address is empty and only the Invoice address is stored.
2. The whole WooCommerce account feature is deactivated. On the WC checkout page, I can still enter discount codes (which is good because it allows me to apply the dinamically generated codes about which I talked above), but the link asking me if I am already registered (with corresponding login box) is not displayed.
   NB: this is also a more general issue for Hotel Booking, given that users are unable to create an account and therefore are unable to take advantage of the corresponding features (e.g. avoiding to always have to re-enter their personal data, keep track of orders/bookings/payments, seing available amount on gift cards, etc.).
3. The whole deposit process of Hotel Booking causes some troubles with the use of gift cards, given that only the deposit amount will be deducted. In this case a more dynamic handling of the Deposit feature (and the way it is passed to WC) would be needed.
4. If an indirect payment (e.g. Bank wire or Cash on arrival) is selected instead of a more direct payment (through PayPal or similar), the bookings remain pending. This has as a side effect, that in a first time, the confirmation emails are sent only through WooCommerce and are very limited if compared to the confirmation emails sent directly from Hotel Booking (this applies to both the Admin and Customer emails): the order confirmation displays only the product defined in WC (I simply called it “Booking” for now), and there are none of the details which are available in the Hotel Booking emails (dates, room details, taxes, total amount vs deposit, etc.).
   NB: I did not disable any of the Hotel Booking emails, I simply activated WC as the only payment gateway. Additionally, the issue happens independently if I activate/deactivate the option “Use Hotel Booking checkout endpoints instead of WooCommerce ones.” (the only difference of this option appears to be the confirmation page).

Is there any chance that the Woocommerce payment gateway will be further enhanced in the near future?

Kind regards,
Aron

[Mary Evans]

Hello Aaron,

1.,3. For now, there is no such possibility and we have not been requested about this before.
Also, we have not been requested to configure Hotel Booking deposit directly for gift cards.
Nevertheless, we will keep your requests in mind to consider them further, in case there are more such requests in the future.
2. For now, there is no guest accounts functionality within the Hotel Booking plugin and we do not recommend configuring it via WooCommerce.
We have such a request on our feature requests list, to have guest accounts within Hotel Booking. We can add your vote for this feature, in order to notify you when this gets implemented.
4. Please, note that it is possible to activate the Pay on Arrival and Direct Bank Transfer payment gateways within the Hotel Booking settings directly. In this way, bookings will automatically be confirmed and the appropriate Hotel Booking email template will be sent.

Our developers do their best, in order to and add more functionality to the WooCommerce Payments addon and update it as frequently as possible.

Best Regards,
M. Evans

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