How we eliminated 3 crucial design drawbacks of a One-Page Checkout in our extension? One page checkout has been in the debate for a very long time now. There are dozens of articles on the topics like "Should you choose a one-page checkout?" "Pros and Cons of One Page Checkout" and so one. Most of these articles effectively address the drawbacks, but it seems like we have been promoting these drawbacks like they are there forever and cannot be taken down anyhow. Let's face the truth, every new introduction has some cons for sure. Gradually, with the development and research, these cons fade away for sure. In this article, I am going to address 3 such cons of a one-page checkout which we eliminated from our Magento one page checkout extension and also the PrestaShop One page checkout module. Most of these cons were never there in our checkout extension, as we took care of them while in the development and testing phase itself.
One page checkout fixed drawbacks 1. So much of details on a single page? It will be congested Most of the checkout pages, when introduced in the past, had this problem. It was really a massive task to adjust everything from a multi-page checkout on a single page. The most problematic challenge was to fit all those checkout elements on a single page and it should provide a full view of the whole checkout page as well. Moreover, all the checkout elements like login, delivery address form, billing address form, payment options, shipping options, and cart review should not overlap with each other, and neither they should overlap on themselves. A lot of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Ajax were needed to be handled to keep the design all fine with the default as well as the third party Magento themes. But
we intended to keep them as lesser as possible for faster page loading. This is what we came up with:
A lot of HTML, CSS, JS, and Ajax were tweaked by our designers to fit all the elements neatly and clearly on a single page and also to keep the page loading time optimal. Moreover, thanks to our designers, after all these, there was sufficient space left to add the Social login option using Facebook and Google+ on our checkout page.
2. The form on the page are congested with no white-spaces and proper label usage ď ľ
While designing the forms, the main aspects that we were looking for were:
Keeping the forms compact
All the necessary fields should be there
Fields should have proper white-spaces
Labels should not confuse the users
Admin should be able to choose which form field he wants to show on the page to customers.
Labels Labels were coming out as a major concern here. If we would keep the labels by the side of the respective fields, the horizontal length of the form would give a very less space for the other sections on the page. We also thought about a form design where we would skip the labels and use Placeholders in place of them. Something like this:
But, there was a problem in that. For considerably long forms like Billing and Address forms, if customer once filled the detail, and the later stage if he would want to re-check them, he would get confused about what actually are these details. Since the placeholder vanishes away as you type in, and there is no
label as well, there always remains a confusion if my details are right or wrong. We didn't want your customers to get into such confusion and forget the main goal of making a purchase, that's why we drop the idea. Otherwise, it could have saved a lot of space as well. Finally, we decided to not to compromise with the user experience anyhow and we adopted the label placement above the fields as shown in this image:
It saved the horizontal space that we needed for other elements and also helped in one another feature which has been discussed below.
The necessary fields After dealing with the label placement, the last thing in the forms that gave us a nightmare was to include every necessary field in the form. Problem is, the term necessary is quite relative here. A form field which is necessary for one store owner might be of no use to the other. For example, the VAT number, and Company Name is a necessary field of a store owner who has a B2B selling business. All of your European business clients would also need this field for making the purchases on your store. On the other hand, a store owner who directly sells to the individual consumers would have no use of the fields like VAT Number and Company Name. How we handled it? It was a time to open our checkout extension a bit and give the store owners some easy yet crucial development access. We add a feature in our module, using which the admin can easily enable, disable, add, and delete a field from the checkout form. That too, without editing the code. All this can be done from the backend itself.
So, if any of the fields is not usable for a store owner, he can simply hide it with a simple click and save. No need to go through the complex Magento or PrestaShop codes to do this now.
3. Frequent page reload on cart update Those multi-page checkouts have a dedicated page for editing the shopping carts. It was a challenge for us to include the shopping cart on the checkout
page. Customers would frequently update the cart by increasing or decreasing the product counts, removing a product from the cart and so one. All these requests required a page reload to update all the checkout details and information according to the latest cart status. If a product has been removed from the cart, we needed to update the total cost, cart product quantity, shipping methods and so on with it. It would have become so irritating for the customers if the checkout page would reload every now and then. This challenge is faced by every one-page checkout development. However, we managed to fix it with the Ajax based shopping cart and form update request.
Now, with Ajax shopping cart and updates, if a customer changes anything in the cart, all the dependent details would get automatically updated without reloading the whole checkout page. Even the customer can apply a coupon code to the cart and page would validate the coupon without being reloaded. This is how we solved these issues in our checkout extension. You can have a free demo to experience all these features of the extension. Free Demo one page checkout Magento and PrestaShop and OpenCart.