Why not a true onepage checkout for 1.5?

A while ago i posted a topic about why not the new OC1.5 uses a true onepage checkout, this topic was deleted soon after, and i think the whole category it was under. Nevermind that, but i still want some opinions on why there is no true onepage checkout in OC1.5.
On my earlier post i did get one answer, stating that it would be extremely difficult to achive, why so, could someone explain why this is so hard? I know lots of commercial webshops that uses what i call onepage checkout.
I read in another OC-forum thread that it would require some AJAX and stuff, if so, is that a problem?
Im not a developer or coder, just fiddeling with some HTML, CSS and javascript on my own little webshop, so go easy on me.
In the end, isnt it all about making it simple and easy for the customer to make orders? I know many people that just places stuff in the cart, and then go to the checkout to instantly see what the total would be, including shipping and other fees.
That isnt possible if its not a true onepage checkout.
IMO all info (products, billing info, shipping info, coupons and total costs should be visible at the same time, and if the customer is happy, then just click on "confirm order"
If this would be possible in a mod, then it would be great, as long as it works!

Maybe there is some laws in some countries that perhibit this kind of fast checkouts, but it should then be something that could be changed in admin.

Any thought around this?

Well, I know there are some commercial shopping cart scripts that offer what you are requesting. However they are a hosted solution and you have to pay a monthly fee for them. I don't know if there are any Open Source shopping carts that offer what you are requesting out of the box.

FWIW though, I don't think the new checkout is all that bad. I mean, the customers are staying on one page, it's just each section of the checkout is now in a drop down (kinda accordion esque) section. They can't see everything at once, but I personally think that's a good thing. Keeps them from getting overwhelmed.

opencartisalright: I dont think i have seen any open source carts with this feature either, but why not change that? I really dont think this is so extreamly difficult that only commercial carts have the resources to implement it.
All you developers out there, whats your view on this, and Daniel, i think you have said that true onepage checkouts is rubbish, why is that? Rubbish as in shitty code or rubbish as in bad experience for the customer?
At least here in Sweden there are many surveys that indicates better conversion rates and for the customer, a sense of more control over the whole process, with a checkout with all info visible at the same time.
If i myself are choosing between several stores that offer the same product, i choose the one that offer a clear and fast checkout (as long as it live up to normal standard for the rest of the site ofcourse).

Anyone considering making a mod?

e-Hifi wrote:Any thought around this?

I wished that this kind of wining would stop.

Hire a coder, pay good money for a true on page checkout and get over it, because what ever Daniel comes up with there is always someone wining over it like a baby

If it was me this topic would be closed.

Jees, get a life.

i2Paq wrote:

e-Hifi wrote:Any thought around this?

I wished that this kind of wining would stop.

Hire a coder, pay good money for a true on page checkout and get over it, because what ever Daniel comes up with there is always someone wining over it like a baby

If it was me this topic would be closed.

Jees, get a life.

i2Paq: You call this wining? I simply just wanna get opinions of WHY there seems to be some sort of resistance to a true onepage checkout. Of course i can get a good webshop with a fast checkout, but why do many of us look at open source? Yes, exactly, its a financial question and small buisinesses must be careful with expenses.
Please drop this kind of "get a life" replies, and do you really want all people that have questions and thought of things to improve on OC to buy some expensive software and just ignore OC in the future??
I really like OC in many ways, and if you have any real arguments of why its not a good idea to implement fast checkout, please feel free to do so, i want to know.

e-Hifi wrote:I know many people that just places stuff in the cart, and then go to the checkout to instantly see what the total would be, including shipping and other fees.

you can do that straight from the cart page on 1.5 for the most part. You simply have to enter your zip code, which is really just a fact of life it's impossible to create a system that can tell you shipping and taxes without having the customer enter the shipping address or at least the zip code(for US not sure what exact info is needed in other countries).

The reason a true one page is hard to write is for these exact reasons. Many parts of the checkout rely on information from other parts. If you have zone based shipping or payment you can't show them until you have the address information. There are several things in the checkout process that rely on other information being available and you have to account for all that stuff to happen via ajax. It's just difficult.

Xsecrets wrote:you can do that straight from the cart page on 1.5 for the most part. You simply have to enter your zip code, which is really just a fact of life it's impossible to create a system that can tell you shipping and taxes without having the customer enter the shipping address or at least the zip code(for US not sure what exact info is needed in other countries).

The reason a true one page is hard to write is for these exact reasons. Many parts of the checkout rely on information from other parts. If you have zone based shipping or payment you can't show them until you have the address information. There are several things in the checkout process that rely on other information being available and you have to account for all that stuff to happen via ajax. It's just difficult.

Xsecrets: Thanks for your answer, i do see your point in calculating shipping fees. I guess in smaller countries there are often a fixed shipping fee independent of which adress, but in say US, i can imagine there would be different fees as the distances can be vast.
But is it impossible to update shipping fee "on the fly" as soon as customer have entered the zipcode?
Other fees would just alter as soon as you change paymentmethod or similar things, as it would update when you click a radiobutton for instance?

Im really curious if OC 1.5 could be altered this way with a mod if not in the core files.
Anyone have any ideas or thinking about making a mod?

e-Hifi wrote:

Xsecrets wrote:you can do that straight from the cart page on 1.5 for the most part. You simply have to enter your zip code, which is really just a fact of life it's impossible to create a system that can tell you shipping and taxes without having the customer enter the shipping address or at least the zip code(for US not sure what exact info is needed in other countries).

The reason a true one page is hard to write is for these exact reasons. Many parts of the checkout rely on information from other parts. If you have zone based shipping or payment you can't show them until you have the address information. There are several things in the checkout process that rely on other information being available and you have to account for all that stuff to happen via ajax. It's just difficult.

Xsecrets: Thanks for your answer, i do see your point in calculating shipping fees. I guess in smaller countries there are often a fixed shipping fee independent of which adress, but in say US, i can imagine there would be different fees as the distances can be vast.
But is it impossible to update shipping fee "on the fly" as soon as customer have entered the zipcode?
Other fees would just alter as soon as you change paymentmethod or similar things, as it would update when you click a radiobutton for instance?

Im really curious if OC 1.5 could be altered this way with a mod if not in the core files.
Anyone have any ideas or thinking about making a mod?

of course it's possible. That's the AJAX stuff people are talking about, but it's not easy, and it takes time to code. There will be a true one page module out for 1.5 because I will most likely be starting on one soon. However even working on it pretty steady it will take at least a couple of months to complete, because like I said it's not some simple thing you can throw together real quick. Sure you can do something quickly that will work for some people if you don't have any api based shipping or zone based shipping and payment you can do it fairly easily, but if you make something like that you'll have a complaint about missing features before you can hit the submit button on the announcement.

To be honest - just get to work and do it yourself. Personally I've already simplified the cart view, as I ship only to one country and I don't rely on geo zones/postcode - so I've made a dropbox that loads automatically while you go to view your cart. I also don't see any problem in applying all fields (coupons, shipping, voucher, reward) in one click, but I don't really see the point.

1.5 has a great potential, but IMO it requires some tweaking - learn to code guys and girls ^_^

Xsecrets: Sounds really interesting that you are going to tackle this thing, im really looking forward to that!!
I understand that creating this kind of thing is somewhat difficult when you have to consider all kinds of different needs in different parts of the world.
My first thought was actually to simplify the checkout to just suit my webshop, but im not sure i will manage, but perhaps i will give it a try anyway, im just have to learn how OC is built and tweak it the best i can.

emq: Maybe i will do it myself (if i can manage) but i was mainly interested in why this topic seems to anger some folks so much. Maybe this question is irrelevant to many customers out there, i dont know, but at least in Sweden, people more or less expect a checkout that dont uses to many steps. And since i live in Sweden i have to consider this, and i myself do like a fast onepage checkout much better. I cant really see why a checkout with many steps would be a better choice, but if there is some good reason, please share it! (i dont think all info will confuse people, just keep it simple)

Thanks for your answers!

I think the reason people get upset is terminology. Steps versus clicks. In order to provide all the functionality that opencart does you absolutely have to have to have all the steps. Granted individual businesses depending on their practices location etc may not need every step, but other people will. What you don't absolutely need is all the clicks. The steps still have to happen they just happen in the background using ajax based on focus events etc so that the customer does not have to click a button.

1.5.x does have a true one page checkout. It is simply categorized by tabs to hide/show the fields as needed and used, but if you removed the tabs, the page could have all the sections on the same page. They'd still use ajax to load the data as they do now.

Qphoria wrote:1.5.x does have a true one page checkout. It is simply categorized by tabs to hide/show the fields as needed and used, but if you removed the tabs, the page could have all the sections on the same page. They'd still use ajax to load the data as they do now.

yes, but they would still require the user to click on a button 4 times. This is the part people don't like.

Xsecrets wrote:

Qphoria wrote:1.5.x does have a true one page checkout. It is simply categorized by tabs to hide/show the fields as needed and used, but if you removed the tabs, the page could have all the sections on the same page. They'd still use ajax to load the data as they do now.

yes, but they would still require the user to click on a button 4 times. This is the part people don't like.

?? what people? what buttons? You can simply make it like www.onestepcheckout.com from the current page. You don't have to click the continue button then.

Qphoria wrote:

Xsecrets wrote:

Qphoria wrote:1.5.x does have a true one page checkout. It is simply categorized by tabs to hide/show the fields as needed and used, but if you removed the tabs, the page could have all the sections on the same page. They'd still use ajax to load the data as they do now.

yes, but they would still require the user to click on a button 4 times. This is the part people don't like.

?? what people? what buttons? You can simply make it like http://www.onestepcheckout.com from the current page. You don't have to click the continue button then.

If you simply make all the stuff on that page visible you will still have 4 buttons on the page. if you simply remove them things won't work. you'll have to assign their functions to events like onchange or something in the appropriate data fields. Even on the page you linked to they do show an onchange to update the totals when you choose a shipping option, but what they don't show is how it works with dynamic shipping options. If you are using usps or usp etc then you can't show the shipping quotes until you have the shipping zip code. Same goes if you are using zone based shipping/payment you can't show the options till you know which options need to be shown, so you'll have to have some sort of onchange event on the address. I haven't dug into the code yet, but I belive all the backend ajax functionallity is probably already there in 1.5, but you're still going to have to work out all the events to fire the ajax calls to display everything, so no it's not just as simple as laying out the page differently.

Well I dont think anyone has a problem with 4 buttons.. until we have cognitive thinking interfaces for PC's.. you have to click buttons still.

You have to choose a shipping, you have to choose a payment, you have to click confirm. The OP is complaining about the tabs as opposed to just having it open, which could be done now.

Qphoria wrote:Well I dont think anyone has a problem with 4 buttons.. until we have cognitive thinking interfaces for PC's.. you have to click buttons still.

I can promise you that is what these people are complaining about, and they are not alone. I've had numerous customers already request a no click interface for opencart checkout and more than I can count that wanted it for oscommerce when I was working with that before opencart.

You have to choose a shipping, you have to choose a payment, you have to click confirm. The OP is complaining about the tabs as opposed to just having it open, which could be done now.

the problem is unless you have set business rules like flat rate shipping and no zones you can't show that when you first load the page, so while it could fairly easily be modified for a particular shop it's more difficult to write it in a way that works for all possible configurations.

Xsecrets wrote: I can promise you that is what these people are complaining about, and they are not alone. I've had numerous customers already request a no click interface for opencart checkout and more than I can count that wanted it for oscommerce when I was working with that before opencart.

But that doesn't make any sense. "No click interface" ? That isn't normal and I can't think of a single mainstream shopping cart that hasn't thing close to that. A one page checkout means something like the http://www.onestepcheckout.com site, which CAN be done with the new 1.5.0 checkout page if you add some defaults and remove the tabs. But clicking buttons can't be prevented. I've never heard of a no-click checkout or a request for one in my life until today from your posts.

Maybe you mean you want to have the cart along the right side as you shop, that is the only way I can think to have something like a no-click interface. So then that would be a checkout module that you could put on the right side. Still I only saw that one place in that nerve jquery demo store:
http://www.sourcebits.com/nerve/

That would be great, but has nothing to do with opencart's checkout or the topic of "onepage". Just make a module for it. But you still have to click "Checkout".. and still have to choose shipping/payment unless you only have one. so i dont understand what "no-click" means.

You could also optimize the current checkout by skipping over the tab for shipping and payment choice if you only have one, similar to the autochoose tweaks that I had for previous versions. But you'll always have to click something

Qphoria wrote:Well I dont think anyone has a problem with 4 buttons.. until we have cognitive thinking interfaces for PC's.. you have to click buttons still.

You have to choose a shipping, you have to choose a payment, you have to click confirm. The OP is complaining about the tabs as opposed to just having it open, which could be done now.

Qphoria: My greatest concert is to get rid of all the extra clicks (steps) and just show all info at once, but the customer still have to choose shipping and payment method, by cklicking on some radiobuttons for instance, and have the total price update dynamically. And if thats quite easily done with OC 1.5 as it is, just remove the tabs and a little tweaking, thats great news!
At least if you dont use zones, as Xsecrets pointed out, that will be a little more difficult i think.

Xsecrets wrote:If you simply make all the stuff on that page visible you will still have 4 buttons on the page. if you simply remove them things won't work. you'll have to assign their functions to events like onchange or something in the appropriate data fields. Even on the page you linked to they do show an onchange to update the totals when you choose a shipping option, but what they don't show is how it works with dynamic shipping options. If you are using usps or usp etc then you can't show the shipping quotes until you have the shipping zip code. Same goes if you are using zone based shipping/payment you can't show the options till you know which options need to be shown, so you'll have to have some sort of onchange event on the address. I haven't dug into the code yet, but I belive all the backend ajax functionallity is probably already there in 1.5, but you're still going to have to work out all the events to fire the ajax calls to display everything, so no it's not just as simple as laying out the page differently.

Xsecrets: I guess what you are referring to is the " continue" button on each tab, those buttons must be eliminated if you remove the tabs,for this to be a real onepage checkout. The customer still have to choose shipping and payment ofcourse, but a click on let say a radiobutton for flat rate shipping should then dynamically change the total price.
Have i got it right?

e-Hifi wrote: Qphoria: My greatest concert is to get rid of all the extra clicks (steps) and just show all info at once, but the customer still have to choose shipping and payment method, by cklicking on some radiobuttons for instance, and have the total price update dynamically. And if thats quite easily done with OC 1.5 as it is, just remove the tabs and a little tweaking, thats great news!
At least if you dont use zones, as Xsecrets pointed out, that will be a little more difficult i think.

Yes that is what I am referring to. Zone's aren't really an issue as the shipping will reload with ajax as it does now. Basically instead of tabs hiding the ajax load.. it will show the open box with a loading animation that reloads based on what data is entered.

Box 1: Address
- Shows details form

Box 2: Shipping & Payment
- Reloads after address is entered (for zones and shipping rate lookups)

Box 3: Total
- Reloads after address is entered
- Reloads after shipping is chosen
- Reloads after payment is chosen (for things like payment type fee)