Hello all! We have a retail music business that rents to own band and orchestra instruments. Currently, we have an online rental form that has to be filled out before the customer can add an instrument to their WooCommerce shopping cart (using the Product Add On plugin.) We are now going to require that renters fill out an Credit Authorization form to have their credit approved before renting an instrument. We haven’t been able to find a way to do credit checks directly from our website (maybe you know how this part could be accomplished,) so we’ll have to manually approve everyone before letting them move to the rental process (Example rental page here: https://ntunemusic.com/shop/select-school/andrews-middle-school/andrews-middle-school-clarinet-rental/)
My question is this… is there a way to setup a Gravity form that could conditionally move the customer to the rental form AFTER they’ve been approved? The ideal scenario would be to find a way to run credit checks from the website and then upon approval, redirect the customer back to the rental form…
Hi Rick, yes absolutely this can all be accomplished. But you’re moving into the realm of custom development. I very much doubt you will be able to accomplish this with off-the-shelf plugins.
To run a credit check programmatically you’re looking at using an API. You’ll likely need to subscribe to and pay for a service like Experian to do credit checks online.
On the tech side it could work like this:
Create a form that collects the data required for a credit check
Use that data submission to make an API request to your 3rd party credit provider while you show the user some kind of loader/please wait on a confirmation page for that form.
When you get a result from the credit provider conditionally either redirect the user to the rental form, or to some other page telling them they unfortunately are not approved.
As you can tell, you will need a bit of development help making this work as well as a relationship with a credit provider. Please note that these credit requests often are expensive per call so you want to make sure your code doesn’t do automatic retries or something perilous that could run up quite a cost. (I speak from very expensive experience from an agency I worked with).
@simonc that is a great break-down on the approach to look at and the details (ney costs) related to the credit checks. Rick - It may not need as much custom development as you might expect assuming the credit provider has a strong set of APIs.
If going the manual approval route, Gravity Flow’s approval step can give you super easy way to review and approve that is assigned to your staff to access only. Or one-click approval links if you prefer email to action them.
On the automated side, our outgoing webhook step lets you map fields into the request and values from the response back into fields without code. And the incoming webhook extension can help if the provider might need the response to come back asynchronously.
@JamieO Thank you for your response. We actually had a management meeting about this process today. I would be very interested in visiting with you to discuss this further as we’ve decided that we are going to need to implement something really quickly. I do know that we are setup through Experian for all of our credit checks, and our owner wants to obtain credit approval on our website so that the customer doesn’t have to leave the site before proceeding.
Is there any way that we could talk? My email address is; rowens@ntunemusic.com. Maybe we could setup a phone visit and I could go into more specific detail.
@simonc Thank you Simon. I do know that we are currently setup with Experian. Our payment processing is handled through Authorize.net.
Currently, the rental form is being presented on the page with the Gravity Forms Product Add On plugin and has to be filled out prior to checkout. Once it’s been completed, the form creates a printable pdf contract that shows all of the rental payment information and does all of the calculations (this part was custom created for us by the guys at GravityPDF.)
Does this information help you? I appreciate your response.