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Wigadoo Website Review

Software Websites

Written by admin

Monday, 23 June 2008

Page 2 of 2

How to collect the Money

The next stage involves Wigadoo asking how you want to collect money, this can either be the old fashioned method of manually collecting payment from everyone - thus you still get hassle but at least you have more organisation - or you can use Wigadoo's online payment system.

The online payment system is where Wigadoo makes its money, as it involves creating a prepaid virtual MasterCard that is used to collate all the money pledged by your friends/family.

So essentially when your friends agree to come on the outing (more on this later*) they then key in their card details and the money is added to the prepaid card - but as we said before no money is taken out at this stage.

Being a prepaid MasterCard does mean that if you don't have any money on the card you can't spend it, thus you can never go into debt with this card. It also has all the protection of a standard payment card.

The virtual card simple grants you all of the card details you need to make an online or phone booking, i.e. card number, security code, expiry date etc. If you want you can also transfer some or all of the money to your bank account (so you can withdraw cash or use your own cards - we think there is £2 transfer charge for this).

Wigadoo are developing physical as opposed to virtual cards as we write this review, so these will be available in the future to those who wish to have a physical card in their wallet to spend with - these cards will have the chip and pin system.

Having one payment card will of course make it less of a hassle when having to pay for a large trip - the logistics of paying for a trip using individual payments cards would be a nightmare.

However whilst the organiser does not incur any costs whatsoever - except for the cost of their own ticket for example, your friends or colleagues will have to pay £1.50 extra if you pay by debit card or if you are collecting less than £50 on a credit card.

Anything over £50 on a credit card will incur a 3% charge of the cost you're collecting. (Note it clearly informs recipients of the costs before they commit to any payment pledge)

The FAQ section of Wigadoo's site explains the costs and chip and pin system in a bit more detail (we will add the url link when the site goes fully live).

Some may find the above costs a bind, but we are sure that most friends/family will welcome the stress free side of things. Plus as mentioned you don’t need to use an online payment method anyway, if you are organising events in the old fashioned method.

*Sending to your Friends

After the event is planned Wigadoo then creates a unique web link that you can send your friends. The link can either be emailed or added to popular social networking sites such as 'Facebook' or online groups such as Google.

When your friends get the link they can then see a form with all the event details in place and more importantly anyone one else that will be attending.

Your friends can then select on the form if they want to attend or say that they will only attend if one of their other friends comes along.

If your friends decide to attend the event, they will then be asked to create a Wigadoo account and key in their card details (if the organiser requests payment by an online method).

Keeping track of things

Wigadoo provides the organiser with complete control over the planned event, so essentially you can see who or hasn't signed up.

You can also contact the group, view messages left, collect money (when the minimum attendance total has been met) and also edit your event. Though one snag is if you change the money pledged at this stage, it will re-email people asking them to confirm their pledges again.

Throughout the latter stages of the process, emails are sent to the organiser and attendees informing them of when the payment process will be taking place - thus taking the hassle away from the organiser.

Is it worth it?

If the above system sounds complex it isn't and is actually quite straightforward to use.The question of whether Wigadoo is worth it or not is entirely dependent on the events you are looking to plan and go on.

In some situations the online payment system would not be practical, for example booking a cinema outing. Normally the latter already has a surge charge placed on an online cinema ticket purchase (though this varies) and add to the Wigadoo charges, this would make a simple cinema outing expensive.

So Wigadoo's online payment system is more suited to larger events (meals, holidays, theatre tickets etc).

At the end of the day Wigadoo can be used without you having to spend a penny, so if you still want to arrange smaller outings, where people will pay for themselves in cash, the Wigadoo system is still ideal.

Bear in mind though as well that Wigadoo is not going to book the events for you - you still have to do this yourself - so the organiser still has a bit of work to do.

Another question that will probably pop into your mind is once you have collected all this money, there could be the outside chance that you may not be able to book your event, for example if it has sold out or being cancelled.

However this situation can occur even if you collect money from people manually and at least with the online pledge system in place you can get the money in advance, plus no money is actually taken from your friends cards until you confirm the event.

All in all we can happily say that Wigadoo has great promise and we wish the site good luck. Like we said before you can use the site in its entirety for free if you want to, but at the same time you have the online payment system available at a small cost.

Editor review : Final thoughts

36 of 36 people found the following review helpful


Overall rating		8.0
Design		9.0
Ease of use		8.0
Features		7.0

We feel Wigadoo is a great concept and is a site that should be useful for anybody who wants to organise events for their friends or families.

You can also use the site for virtually free as well, unless you decide to create an online payment process that is. However the latter is certainly useful for collecting money from multiple cards into one easy to use online payment.

Finally there is also a handy selection of event ideas placed on the site - which should increase as time goes on - so choosing something that you could do with your mates is made a little bit easier.

Note: Above scores reflect our initial impressions based on the Beta version of their site.

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