I am currently working on a WPLMS enhancement for a customer, that allows to simplify the payout of instructor commissions. The whole system runs on the MyCred Points System and students pay for courses with Points. The problem is how to easily payout the instructor commissions via PayPal.
There is currently no addon for MyCred available that does that magic, so I build one myself.
At the moment the payment process via PayPal is completely manual, due to budget constraints. I am basically generating a custom “Send Money” link that prefills the PayPal email and amount to send.
The interface itself handles the payout sessions, tracks the instructor balance, paid and unpaid points.
Here some images to illustrate the admin dashboard:
This list the instructors and their point balance and allows to start the payment process.
Payout sessions make sure, that only one session can be started per instructor, as the instructor could earn new points during the process. The points converted can be changed, allowing you to payout a fixed amount of points.
Its a 3 step process. Login at PayPal. Open the “Send money” dialog and send money to instructor. Confirm that you manually send the money and than register the payment and payout points in the system.
The session can be cancelled at any point. You can also leave the session open and continue at a later point.
On the frontend I added an interface to the BuddyPress Profile, that allows the instructor to track his payouts and balance.
The whole setup could be updated using PayPal Adaptive Payments, to make the whole process completely automated. Something to consider for the future :) Pretty happy with the manual process so far and it will be a great help for my customer to keep track of the commission payouts.
The whole setup is currently targeted for WPLMS, but can easily be adapted to other setups using the MyCred Points System.
