Didion Golf Sponsorship — Gravity Forms E-Commerce Redesign

Overview

Didion's annual golf tournament previously used 25+ individual Gravity Forms — one per sponsorship level. This article documents the decision to consolidate into a single e-commerce-style form, the technical challenges encountered, and the resolution of a blocking PayPal webhook misconfiguration.

Client: ^[1]
Key Contact: Diana Henry (dhenry@didioninc.com)
Team: Isahaque Mahmud, Melissa Cusumano

The Problem with the Old Approach

• 25+ separate forms, one per sponsorship level, created maintenance overhead and a fragmented user experience.
• Payment processing was previously handled by Square; the switch to PayPal introduced a webhook misconfiguration that blocked transactions.
• No centralized quantity tracking existed across sponsorship types.

New Form Architecture

Core Concept

Replace all individual forms with one Gravity Forms e-commerce flow that behaves like a shopping cart:

1. User selects a sponsorship level from a product dropdown.
2. The associated price auto-populates into a running cart total.
3. Optional add-ons (e.g., golf ball toss) can be added to the same transaction.
4. User checks out via PayPal in a single payment.
5. Form captures required attendee/golfer information in the same submission.

Required Fields & Behaviors

Technical Implementation Notes

Product Field vs. Standard Dropdown

Gravity Forms requires a Product field (not a standard dropdown) to associate prices with selections and feed them into a payment total. The field type should be set to Dropdown within the Product field options.

• Label and price can be set per choice within the product field editor.
• A standard dropdown cannot drive payment calculations natively.

Quantity Tracking — The Core Challenge

"The native Gravity Forms quantity field is for a single product, not for tracking multiple, distinct sponsorship options within a dropdown." — Isahaque Mahmud

The built-in Gravity Forms Quantity field (found under Pricing Fields) maps to a single product. It does not support per-option inventory tracking across a multi-choice product dropdown.

Two paths under evaluation:

1. Custom PHP code — Write logic that tracks submission counts per sponsorship choice against a defined maximum, then dynamically marks options as sold out or appends remaining count to the label.
2. Gravity Whiz add-on — Diana installed this plugin based on research suggesting it may offer a no-code or low-code alternative for quantity limiting. Isahaque to evaluate whether it covers the multi-option use case.

Status: Under active research. Isahaque committed to a status update within one business day of the meeting.

Sponsorship Quantity Reference (Sample)

Some levels have a quantity of 1, others up to 18, and some are unlimited. The implementation must handle all three cases gracefully.

PayPal Webhook — Problem & Resolution

Root Cause

The PayPal webhook registered in Gravity Forms settings was a sandbox webhook URL, not a live one. This was copied over from a sandbox testing session and never replaced, causing payment processing to fail on the live site.

Fix Applied (During This Meeting)

1. Diana navigated to Gravity Forms → Settings → PayPal.
2. Disconnected the existing PayPal connection.
3. Reconnected using the live PayPal account credentials (not sandbox/developer mode).
4. The new live webhook was automatically registered.

Result: Webhook status now shows Active. Payment processing is unblocked.

"Maybe the roadblock was happening when I was trying to add the sandbox webhook instead." — Diana Henry

Lesson

When switching from sandbox to production in Gravity Forms PayPal add-on, a full disconnect → reconnect cycle is required to replace the webhook URL. Manually editing the webhook ID in settings does not work.

Action Items

Related

• ^[2]
• ^[3]