With CS-Cart 4.3.1 customers spend less time on checkout

Hello!

After adding a product to the cart the customer proceeds to checkout to pay for the order. During checkout, the customer completes four steps:

1. Signs in to an existing account or registers a new one
2. Enters the billing and shipping addresses
3. Chooses the shipping method
4. Chooses the payment methods

CS-Cart 4.2.4 and earlier have two checkout styles. The store admin switches between them on the Settings → General page in the admin panel:

• Multi-page checkout—when a customer proceeds to the next checkout step, the web browser reloads the whole page. Reloading a page takes almost as much time as initially loading it.

• One-page checkout—moving through steps doesn’t reload the whole page but only updates a part of it. Since there’s less to load, switching between steps is faster.

One-page checkout works on the AJAX technology. AJAX allows data exchange between browser and server without the full reloading of the web page.

In CS-Cart 4.3.1 we have removed the multi-page checkout style. From now on, CS-Cart uses one-page checkout by default.

Checkout Settings

The checkout settings have been relocated from Setting → General to Settings → Checkout. You will find a description of each checkout setting on the Documentation → CS-Cart → Settings → Checkout page.

Three of these settings let you hide checkout steps:

• If the sign-in step doesn’t require contact information, you may want to hide this step. Choose Hide step completely in the Configure “Sign in” step setting. When the first step is hidden, unlogged customers place orders anonymously. Logged in customers don’t see this step as well. If a logged in customer has indicated the billing and the shipping addresses in his or her profile, the second step is completed automatically.

• It may be that there is only one shipping method accessible for your region. Place this method first in the Administration → Shipping & taxes → Shipping methods list. Now, go to Settings → Checkout and hide the Shipping options step to use the method you’ve just listed first by default.

• If you offer only one payment method, e.g. credit card, make sure this method is the first in the Administration → Payment methods list. On the Setting → Checkout page, hide the Billing options step. Now, payment by credit card is used by default.

If you want your customers to choose shipping and payment methods themselves, leave the checkboxes ticked:

By hiding all three steps, you let unlogged customers complete only one checkout step instead of four. Registered customers who indicated addresses in their profiles, place orders in one click. Handy!

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What checkout style have you been using in your store? What do you think about the refined checkout in CS-Cart 4.3.1? We would appreciate any comments!

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