CoreCommerce Checkout Pages

Sorry, I had to abandon a cart to check out the checkout. :-)

First off, the checkout process is pretty clunky. After adding something to the cart, you should really take them to the cart to checkout immediately with another button that says return to shopping on that page. As it stands now, it takes them to a page that says continue shopping or view cart - a pointless page.

Once on the cart page, there are way too many buttons to choose from.At least the most important ones are read. Although I know that you have something besides PayPal to choose as a payment method, most consumers have no clue what Authorize.Net is and may assume that their only choice is PayPal (which many people do not like).

You seem to be forcing people to create an account in order to buy from you - something many people do not want to do. They should be able to checkout as a guest without creating an account and password. Yeah, I figured it out that there is an Express Checkout button at the very bottom of the page that bypasses that password requirement but most people are not going to figure that out.

You are forcing people to explain how they found out about you - an unnecessary step. These people are ready to pay you; don't annoy them with superfluous questions! You also have a newsletter signup checked by default - a definite turnoff that will cause some people to lose trust in your site just when they were about to buy from you. People do not like to be tricked into signing up for things. Let them opt-in to your newsletter, not opt-out.

If you absolutely MUST have a force-agree to your terms and conditions, have that checked "yes" by default. It's normally considered very bad for checkout when you require people to say they agree to the terms and conditions. Believe me, almost everyone is going to stop checking out and read them. Knowing the fine print in most agreements, many of them will not come back and check out.

Finally, and most important for conversions, this site sells very expensive things. Figure out a way to work the cost of shipping into the price of products and give them "free" shipping - at least to mainland USA. 80% of all consumers say that is the #1 thing they look for when purchasing online. If people are too stupid to realize there is no such thing as "free", let them believe in it. You may lose a little when shipping to some parts of the country but you will gain a little when shipping to others. It all evens out.

Thank you for your input. I think I may be blinded like Im sure many of us get when we are so deep into our projects that sometimes the simple normal looking things are actually the very things that are holding us down. This is my next big project, cleaning up the checkout process. I wonder what CoreCommerce will let me do....

Ohh and no worries about the abandoned cart, happens regularly LOL

It's been a few years since I used CoreCommerce but all of the things I outlined should be easy to do with CoreCommerce.