As I’m sure using the osCommerce cart knows, the checkout process of this application is an absolute dinosaur. The checkout process, as currently implemented in the latest csv is 8 pages long. The process for a new customer to your store goes something like this.
1.) The customer click the ‘Add ot Cart’ button from the product information page, and is taken to the shopping cart page. 1 page.
2.) They click ‘checkout’ on the shopping cart page, and is directed to the ‘login page’. 2 pages
3.) They click ‘Create an Account’ and are directed to the account detail page. 3 pages
4.) They provide their personal details, and click ‘continue’, and are directed to the ‘create account success’ page. 4 pages
5.) They click ‘continue’ are taken to the checkout shipping page. 5 pages
6.) They select their shipping click ‘continue’ and are taken to the checkout payment page. 6 pages
7.) They enter their payment details, click ‘continue’, and are taken to the checkout confirmation page. 7 pages
8.) They click ‘confirm’ and are taken to the checkout successful page. 8 pages
This checkout process becomes even LONGER is the merchant is using a 3rd party payment processor. Merchants using PayPal force their customers through an 11 page checkout!
A ‘Purchase Without Account (PWA)’ contribution was written a couple of years ago, and is still regularly updated, however this contribution doesn’t he4lp much in this capacity, as it only eliminates ONE page from this checkout process.
Those of us that have been using osC for a long time, have learned ways make small changes to the cart to minimize the checkout process without overhauling the entire process. Normally, the first things I do are…
- Install the ‘Combine Login and Create Account Page’ contribution.
- Change the checkout button on the shopping cart page to redirect the customer to the combined page mentioned above, instead of the login page. There is no reason to have a whole page of the checkout process dedicated to basically asking the customer if they have been here before.
- Change the account details page so that the header reads, “Your Shipping Details”, and remove as many of the fields as possible, and make as few fields required as possible.
- Remove the password, and newsletter field from the account details page, and instead send them a programmatically generated password in their invoice, so they can log back in to your site later for package tracking and account history.
- Change the account details page ‘continue’ button to redirect to the checkout shipping page rather than the checkout success page.
Taking these steps, you can remove 2 pages of the checkout, and ‘mask’ the fact that the customer is creating an account, without having to make wholesale changes to the checkout process. But this still leaves a 6 page checkout, and as many of you know, the more pages your checkout has, the more customers you’re likely to lose along the way. What I’d like to see is a ay to get the checkout down to a 3, or at most 4 page checkout.
Thinking long and hard about various ways to logically reduce the number of pages involved in the checkout process without unnecessarily cluttering the pages, or making one extremely long checkout page (see the one page checkout contribution), here’s what I’ve come up with.
- Combine the Shopping Cart page with the ‘account details page’, including a box to log in. The customer can either continue shopping from this page, log in, or provide their Name and address.
- The next page would be a combined ‘checkout shipping’ page, and ‘checkout payment’ page, where they would select their shipping method, and enter their payment details.
- The next page would be the checkout confirmation page.
- The last page would be the checkout success page.
This would get the checkout down to 4 clicks, which seems to be about industry standard these days. I’d like to know what your thoughts are on this checkout process, if you have any other ideas of your own on how to make the checkout process better.
