Shopping Cart / Booking system required

I have been asked to set up a shopping cart for a yoga teacher where it will be possible for students to book courses online. There is a limited number of seats on each class.

So far I've been using Paypal to allow students to book their seats. When a class is full I have to manually 'close' Paypal and sometimes in the past it did happen that a class was overbooked as the teacher did not check her email in time to work out how many seats were still available.

It makes managing the current booking system quite time consuming and annoying when overbooked as refunds have then to be issued.

I would like to set up an online booking system where there would be a fixed number of seats displayed on the screen. Every time a student books a class the number of seats decreases by one. Once a class is fully booked the booking button is disabled or a message appears to say that the class is fully booked.

I would like to know if such a booking system / shopping cart is available. If possible I would prefer a free open source one otherwise I'm happy to settle with a reasonably priced one with a proven track record. Links appreciated.

Thanks for your help.

These both look like options. I haven't used them though. They seem to be for online systems though.

http://moodle.org/index.php
http://phpnuke.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=8059

There are plenty of CMS systems which could be adapted to make this happen. http://www.opensourcecms.com/

Moodle is good but doesn't allow you to make students pay to register. There may be a plugin for that though, don't know.

Thanks guys...will investigate those links. I've been looking for a while but haven't found a ready to use solution that can reserve seats by taking payments from students.

You could get a regular shopping cart script, and set the quantity (stock left) of an item to the amount of seats you have. There are a lot of these scripts around for free that can are integrated with paypal and easy to install.

I'm a fan of the Maian Script World scripts. I use music script on one of my sites.

http://www.maianscriptworld.co.uk/free-php-scripts/maian-cart/free-paypal-shopping-cart-system/index.html

I'm a fan of the Maian Script World scripts. I use music script on one of my sites.

http://www.maianscriptworld.co.uk/free-php-scripts/maian-cart/free-paypal-shopping-cart-system/index.html

This looks promising. Thanks for the link!