This solution extends features on a shopping cart, such that your customers can buy one or many seats in one or a number of courses or events, with the following features:

• Release these seats (back to public availability) if the shopping cart order is not taken to the paid stage
• Enable users to register on the site and have an account for future orders
• Enable online purchasing through a credit card gateway
• Enable logged in users to view previous order history and update their contact details

The user of the site can purchase seat signups for him / herself and / or other attendees. There are several use cases the system will support:

• 1 registrant user signs up for 1 or more events (e.g. self attending)
• 1 registrant user signs up 2 people for the same event
• 1 registrant user signs up 4 people for 3 different events

While an transaction is in the cart, a temporary seat(s) will be allocated until a payment is received. If no payment has been received within a defined time frame, the seat(s) are released back to the course offering them to another potential attendee.

On checkout, the registrant (the person signing up the attendees) enters email addresses of each attendee into the system. The system will validate the entered email addresses for each entered attendee.

If the system recognises an email address (as a pre-existing users account) it will flag an attendance entry against that attendees user account and not require any more data.

If the entered attendee email is not recognised, it will request the collection of the attendees first name and surname.

Once the attendees data has been collected, if the registrant has used this site before, they will need to login (to authenticate to their pre-existing account). If the registrant account is new, the user will be offered a signup form which will collect the following fields for the new billing account: