Jump to content
  • Checkout
  • Login
  • Get in touch

osCommerce

The e-commerce.

Help to create best Checkout Design


strub

Recommended Posts

all I can offer as help with PayPal is test it using the sandbox. To do this you need to:

1. sign up for paypal sandbox https://developer.paypal.com/

2. Create a Seller, use the seller log-in email in your osC PayPal Standard as the email

3. Create a buyer, use the buyer email to log in to PayPal Sandbox to "make Payments"

 

Thats all I know.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hey thanks for your help.

 

Yes, I know. I have already a sandbox account. But testing with a real account first as not to login all the time.

 

By the way, It works know with sending all the data. I am about to write the contribution and solve the last minor bugs.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have simplified the checkout to 3 pages (2 if already logged in).

 

One page to either login or create account, second page combines all payment, shipping, loyalty points, coupons and voucher selections.

 

Last page to confirm everything.

 

Confirm and all done.

 

To push all to one page without the confirmation page, I do not believe is the way to go.

 

 

This simplifies the entire process though.

 

If anyone is interested, let me know.

 

cheers

Peter McGrath

-----------------------------

See my Profile (click here) for more information and to contact me for professional osCommerce support that includes SEO development, custom development and security implementation

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think I will do a second page to have an overview like the confirmation page as you suggested. Also It would solve many problems with different payment modules to work. What do you think?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The goal of the checkout is to capture the information needed, let them review it, and finish off the order.

 

I see no reason to keep both shipping and payment on two different pages, nor do I see a real need for a complete page to be used for the create account success if being redirected to the checkout area. A simple in the page header message could be used in it's place. Giving the site owner the ability to display this or not from a simple configuration setting.

 

I set up the site to take one address (two can be captured with a small code change using a java form) use it for both shipping and payment. Then allow for the combined change of address edit, shipping, payment etc as a combined page.

 

This stream lines the checkout and have plans for using java to open page tabs so the entire page is managed in sections ie:

  • points / coupons / voucher /
  • payment methods / edit address
  • shipping methods / edit address

last page is pretty much standard osC again.

 

Error checked with the same logic as standard osC with some custom work.

 

It is not all that hard to do in reality, I can supply the create account page without any issues, other pages are too customized to offer here. The login / create account page is the start of the checkout, and if already logged in, then is skipped. No create account success is generated.

 

The idea of having a checkout without account is flawed in my opinion and is not something I advocate people using. This idea gives the customer the impression you are not capturing their data, when in fact you are, additionally, order tracking is lost to the customer to return them to the site, which is where you want them coming to for information ( even for downloads ).

 

cheers

Peter McGrath

-----------------------------

See my Profile (click here) for more information and to contact me for professional osCommerce support that includes SEO development, custom development and security implementation

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@@cannuck1964 I think the guest checkout can work well depending on what you are selling. It works well on my site where people are just making a quick one-off purchase. They have the option to automatically create an account if they check a box during the checkout otherwise they can checkout as a guest.

 

As far as checking their order status they still get email updates and I have set it up so they can use their email address and invoice number to check their order status.

 

All in all I think you have to use the right checkout for your site. It all depends on your particular customers and the items you are selling. If you were to go with a multi page checkout I would think the type you suggested (created) would be a great way to go.

Matt

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hey thanks both of you for your hints

 

@@cannuck1964

I think a success page is an important page. For example, I give on some shops for the first order made a coupon code on the success page as a gift for the order. Or you can ask for signing up a newsletter and so on.

 

In this Smart Checkout though, you can if you want create an account on the success page by just providing a password.

 

@@mattjt83

I think a guest account is a must have nowadays (you can read in many ecommerce magazines).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Not quite sure what the guest account is, I have never really installed or set up one for clients. A guest account to me is a one off sale and I can not really think of any item I would only want to sell once and never try to have another sale with the customer. Repeat sales are important.

 

As for the success page, again, these messages for coupon codes etc can be added to the page where the coupons, payment and shipping is done already.

 

As for newsletters, I found putting it on the checkout success page works well and allows for further marketing on that page. My system, just auto generates a password for them to use, if they plan to return and use the site again, they can switch it to whatever they like using the password function.

 

This idea that an account is created or not really is miss leading. Even in guest checkout (I am assuming) the customers details are gathered and saved, thus there is really no difference in the data saved between the two. the guest idea would lead me to believe that my data was not saved, which is not the case.

 

If it just means that they do not pick a password when they enter their data, then not really a guest checkout. Heck I could call mine that too, and just not send them a password and it would be the same thing.

Peter McGrath

-----------------------------

See my Profile (click here) for more information and to contact me for professional osCommerce support that includes SEO development, custom development and security implementation

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think the guest checkout could be considered misleading to some customers but most understand it to mean that they just don't have to login to place an order and they will always have to put in all their address data etc to place their order. I have set my shop up so customers can either create an account and get some extra benifits like points and rewards or just checkout as a guest as many times as they would like. Guests can leave reviews and I also can send guests review request emails. Guest users can also sign up for my newsletters.

 

Some customers just don't like the idea of having to create another account for another shop that they aren't sure if they will shop at again. I have had several customers come back and create an account on their second order placed through us.

 

If the customer chooses to create an account they have the option of the site automatically creating the password for them or they can create it themselves.

Matt

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Not quite right. The data of a guest account is only stored in the order table and as soon as you delete the order in admin there is no data anymore.

 

Furthermore, if I buy things Online, I don't like giving away to much data, only the neccessary. And I am really fed up creating an account on sites so I just doesn't order something or look on another site. But that's just me.

 

So in this smart checkout there is no option in creating an account only after the order is placed in checkout_success.php so there is no more misunderstanding.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Not quite right. The data of a guest account is only stored in the order table and as soon as you delete the order in admin there is no data anymore.

 

Furthermore, if I buy things Online, I don't like giving away to much data, only the neccessary. And I am really fed up creating an account on sites so I just doesn't order something or look on another site. But that's just me.

 

I am the same way. If I come across a store that forces me to create an account, I leave, and find someone else that sells the same item without the account issue.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Interesting. I do like the idea of asking for the customer data and then at the end asking if they want to insert a password.

 

IMO the general idea is not to take the checkout and make it all on one page. It is to take the checkout and make it as usable as possible, but as lean as possible. For me, that means removing superflous "create_account" questions, removing extra pages such as the two *_success pages and so on.

 

As shopowners, you should be advising the customer that csutomer data is needed for the order to be placed and sent etc. I suppose that if the person chooses not to store a password (and therefore make an account), the customers data could be easily removed from the customers_* tables (as the required data for order processing is stored in the orders_* tables...

 

Thoughts?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think the customer data for the order needs to be retained for a time period, to enable handling of warranties etc.

Now running on a fully modded, Mobile Friendly 2.3.4 Store with the Excellent MTS installed - See my profile for the mods installed ..... So much thanks for all the help given along the way by forum members.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Some thoughts:

 

A checkout procedure should be as easy as possible regardless of customer type.

 

When a customer click on checkout, the next step should be "confirm order". That's it.

 

Presenting all possible options for payment, shipping and so on at that stage is not good at all.

 

A guest should only be forced to fill in e-mail address and the shipping address, in case it's a gift.

A gift is the most likely scenario for a guest.

As payment method there should be only one, namely payment by card, hence the card holders address is also needed.

 

Further, there's no need to store a password for guests, as a password can always be send by "forgotten password".

 

When a customer takes the time to create an account, there should be possibilities to choose prefered

shipping method for physical goods and prefered payment method.

 

Also, as a bonus for registered customers, there should be options for invoice and "recurring billing".

For admin this means checking up on the customer, just to be safe. Recurring billing doesn't exist in osC at all.

The customer then needs to be notified of approval or denial.

 

The possibility to choose a different invoice address than the primary address, is madness wrt possible fraud.

This just means extra job for admin, the recipient must be notified so he/she can approve/deny it.

 

So when a registered customer wants to checkout, the only option the customer have is the shipping address.

In case a customer want's to send a gift. For a this customer it's a list of the customers address book.

 

The shipping address for a guest account is already in place, see above.

 

Both the guest and the registered customer should have a list of what's in the cart and a possibility to change

the carts content. That is, number of products, delete a product, change its options (attributes).

 

If nothing is changed, then it's just a click to confirm the order.

 

Of course, the order must be kept int the db, in case of returns/warranties and if a guest is returning

for example to register. In this case the guest data can be retrieved.

 

Just my thoughts, keep up the good work!

 

Sara

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Designing a checkout will never be easy. Different people want different things.

 

A customer wants the checkout to be as simple as possible with only the minimun infomation given and in as few steps as possible.

 

A store owner wants as much infomation as possible saved to facilitate correct delivery and the ability to keep the infomation for future marketing.

 

Best of luck trying to keep everyone happy.

REMEMBER BACKUP, BACKUP AND BACKUP

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hey many thanks for all the great thoughts.

 

I will soon release the first alpha version of Smart Checkout.

 

By the way, in admin made a new option. Now you can say if you want a confirmation page or not. If not the order will be just made on a single page, otherwise you will be redirected to a confirmation page to confirm your order.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi, I have just one question I am little unsure about and hope someone can answer.

 

I want to create sessions for customers data such as firstname, lastname, email and so on. But only for guests. Because in application_top.php, guest data gets deleted if a certain session is registered. It needs to be set there in case a guest is cancel checkout process. So I need to store the guest data into a session so as not to write his data again in the fields if he wants to checkout again.

 

Now for the session question:

I write data like this:

_sess_write($key, $val)

 

and get the data

_sess_read($key)

 

Now, do I have to add some session_id as key for the session for security reason? And could I add more keys and values to a single session?

 

Thanks for some insight in advance

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ok the session thing is done.

 

Now th only question I have is about the credits.

 

I have used some code snippets from purchase without account. Is it fine if I add some credits on the file I have created or do I need to credit somewhere else?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hey sorry for the long development time but I am still on testing which takes a lot of time. I hope I get it finsihed within a week.

 

By the way, things are quite tricky with the guest accounts and normal accounts, especially in use with a confirmation page. Because a "temporary" account needs to be made in both cases so that it works fine. But if you leave in the confirmation page, there is no way in deleteting guest account.

 

The only way which could work but only for guest account is to check the database customers table and the time the account is created and delete those which are older then 1 day or so. But this does not work with normal accounts because if a customers pays with paypal and does not return back to the shop, the account gets deleted too, really bad.

 

Anyway. The best thing would have been to change the whole code which needs to be used for creating accounts and orders. But that would have been a lot.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ok I was not happy with my current coding and change therefore quite a few things. As you propably know I used the idea of PWA to make orders as a guest but it will still create a temporary account which is not that great. Now, I made it my way. Wrote a new function in order.php so that orders can be made without the need of an account. This has solved many problems too. But because of the changes I need some more time to finish it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well said ggrant3.

Lots of shoppers want to compare total prices, as quoted by several prospective suppliers.

If we require our visitor to give

 

first name

last name

street

city

postcode

email address

password

phone number

date of birth

sex

 

just to be allowed to see the total price, we have lost the sale.

It's true that we may need to ask the destination country, in order to calculate the postage.

But even in this case, let us give a 'why we need to ask' explanation.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ok the development is almost finished. Just need to test everything again.

 

I have added some new options in admin for Smart Checkout:

 

- Create account required: If enabled, customers need to create an account to process orders.

 

- Create account option at checkout page: If enabled, customers have always the option to create an account at the checkout page.

 

- Create account option at success page: If enabled, customers will be asked if they want to create an account at the success page.

 

- Counter enabled: If enabled it will show the steps in numbers to proceed an order.

 

- Send email login data: If enabled, in the succes email, username and password will be sent too.

 

- Confirmation page: If enabled customers will be redirected to a confirmation page.

 

and the other options I said in another post.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...