OneStop.com's Checkout
OneStop.com was a typically short-lived ecommerce business, but I think we did a few things well on the technical side.
Our checkout process was darned good. Customers only entered information on two screens – the Shopping Cart and the Bill-to Ship-to page. In fact, except for the credit card information, all the information for the order was usually pre-filled from the database, based on registration information and previous orders.
At the shopping cart, we asked for the ship-to zip code to let us calculate tax and shipping. Thus one click gave you the total price.
Shopping Cart screen (screenshot)
We added the Shopping Cart History section because many of the orders were repeat buys for disposable items. In the next round of development we would have created a way to store orders, and even repeat orders periodically.
We had a digital coupon system that could flexibly target customers and/or products for discounts.
At the verify order screen customers would either log in, or proceed straight to the billing/shipping screen. Almost all fields would typically be pre-filled from the database.
Our choice was to require customers to enter the full credit card information for each purchase. No one complained about the extra security.
It's common to ask for ship-to information before bill-to, but we felt asking for the bill-to address first was the most straight-forward approach. The bill-to address must match the credit card, so they logically go together.
(The ship-to fields are on the same page, just off the screen in this screenshot.)
The next screen showed all the information about the order for the customer to review, including the items to purchase (again).
Because many of our customers didn't have exclusive access to their computers, we required users to enter their password one more time at this point.
The last screen was the receipt.
Because our customers were small businesses, and we expected them to be frequent buyers, we insisted that they register before purchasing.
Had we been a consumer-oriented site, I would have argued against that approach. We could have allowed purchases without prior registration. We could either assigned an id and password, asked for an id and password when the transaction was complete, or just given customers a transaction id so they could check on the order status.
Copyright © 1998-2011 J. R. Boynton