Checking Out
If there’s anything I loathe about checking out in general, it’s the screens and screens of data entry and confirmation this, confirmation that, almost as if the whole thing was intended to convince me not to spend money. It’s a point of common sense that the more often you ask “Are you sure?”, the more uncertain the questionee is going to be. The last thing you want to do when you’re this close to sealing the deal is to make the process overly complicated. So, to streamline checkout as much as possible, the ideal thing to do is to send the customer directly to the payment processor as quickly as possible with a minimum of data entry.
For digital goods, you can almost just hand the customer off directly to PayPal and be done with it. If you’re shipping a physical product, you have to worry about shipping calculation and potentially stale PayPal address data, so I have an alternative idea for dealing with that.
Instead of the tired old “fill in a ton of address fields” routine, I’d rather turn it upside down. Have the user pick a country first, then build the rest of the form in the correct format for their country, collecting only the minimum necessary information. The country field alone is enough for the shipping calculator to work with for international orders, while domestic US orders would also need a ZIP code.
If you’re supposed to collect sales tax or VAT, you have to collect some location data up front as well. This gets a free ride if a physical product is being shipped, as it can be automatically calculated once that data is entered. Otherwise, present the customer with a simple dropdown list or a radio button list containing only the areas you need to collect tax from. If they decide to tell porkies to get out of paying sales tax, the cart can simply suspend their order when it gets the PayPal notification, and most reasonable people won’t try that more than once.
So far, in our theoretical checkout flow, we’ve only asked the customer for their country, possibly a ZIP code, and if their country happens to contain a taxable region, a short list of taxable locales. The final piece of information, only if physical products are in the order, is a simple shipping address, which we can fit in one big textarea (kind of like you’re filling out the return address on an envelope). That’s a maximum of 4 fields to fill out, 3 of which are potentially optional, and all of which only display if needed.
As with passphrases, that data could be optionally stored for later reuse at any time, possibly by ticking a checkbox.
I was making a payment on a cruise when I realized that even though I’d input the zip code, I had to input the state. Totally redundant. You may well be on to something, but, I’m afraid programmers and managers all too often regard the customer’s time and effort as having zero value. Then, they wonder why they’re losing customers. You’re on to something.
Ooops. I’m anonymous up there.
OK, now I’m book shopping and I have to login again after every “add to cart.” Mr. Roe, get your programming done stat!
I don’t like the fact that after you approve a payment in PayPal, the business can go back and add charges to your PayPal account without asking permission.
I have had this happen a number of times. Sometimes it was an honest mistake when they calculated the amount wrong the first time, but they will send the new charge without asking permission and PayPal will just send more funds.
I have also had this happen with a few merchants in China on E Bay.
I approve a charge and a few days later an additional $3 handling fee from them shows up that I didn’t authorizes.
User accounts are a real pain in the @$$ for me… I’ve been dissuaded several times from making a purchase because the webstore wanted a complete ancestral history [/sarcasm]. If I don’t plan to make regular purchases from a particular seller, I don’t see the point of creating a user account – I’m totally with you on that point.
Someone once told me that websites mine their user account data for sales and demographic info… this, too, makes me not want to engage in e-commerce. The comparison you made between e-commerce and walking into a store really struck a chord: I don’t want to give a company anything other than my money in exchange for their product.
I like all of your points, really. How soon can we begin to force webstores to implement them? 😉
Being an international student what I hate is that I can not use my U.S. Paypal in the U.K. as it refuses to ship to my U.K. address. I would have to create a brand new PayPal in the U.K. with a different history. Why should I need two accounts, I’m assuming it is some stupid Homeland Security law to stop funding terrorism. I don’t know a lot of Terrorists that play GURPS, 40K, and make paper models. Well I don’t know any terrorists so perhaps I’m wrong.
Only 4 people participating in this discussion so far? I guess it’s still too early for The Revolution. 😆
I’m finding online shopping pretty good at the moment. Having said that, I always use paypal and rarely buy anything I can’t download. An exchange rate of $1.4/£1 may have something to do with my positive attitude.
Well, I’d like to have at least the CHOICE if I want to create an account or not. Filling out all the forms just for ordering one item – is that really necessary? :-/
Concerning your approach, Christopher, I find it quite interesting. Would be nice to try that 😉
Yeah, I’m planning to do a little testbed and see how it handles in practice. A lot of it is made possible by PayPal’s various APIs, especially the combination of Express Checkout with Digital Goods. Their documentation makes my head hurt, but I gotta stay sharp. 🙂