Posted Hello, and welcome to the blog of OneStepCheckout.com! After many months of developing our product, we are proud to officially launch it! Our product is simply:
A better Magento Checkout
We have been doing consultancy Magento work for the past two years – and has been involved in launching several dozen online stores, in addition to have started a few ourselves (both with virtual and physical products). If there is a single issue that most of our customers complain about – it is the complexity involved in the original Magento checkout process. Also, from the ecommerce sites we run ourselves, we got weekly calls from our customers that were stuck in the checkout – trying to complete the purchase. As this were causing lost sales on a daily basis, we decided to do something about it …
After only a few weeks, we had a prototype of the new checkout ready. And we were tired of losing sales – so we launched it on the Norwegian fashion clothing site www.ladiesroom.no without giving it any more thought. We left it there for a month without touching anything, and when the month was over we investigated the results.
The easy thing to notice is that we weren’t getting any calls anymore, with customers complaining about being unable to complete the checkout process. Also, we monitored access logs constantly on this site, to have a full overview of how our customers behaved, and what might cause them to exit the checkout process. Before these logs were filled with customers trying to login with a bad username/password, and then tried “Forgotten your password?” for all the different email addresses they can remember and so on. Now our logs had very few entries that were regarding checkout. And the ones that were regarding the checkout, was few, and showed that the average time it took to complete the checkout process were reduced from 5 minutes to 1.5!
But – more importantly – we were able to reduce our checkout abondonment rate from 52% to 47% – which resulted in a sales increase of 10%!
This was over half a year ago – and we have since spent a bunch of hours to develop all kinds of features for the module. And now we are ready to offer it to the public! We’ve also noticed quite a few similar products on Magento Connect recently, so there is definetely an interest for this kind of product.
Our checkout for Magento currently supports:
- All checkout steps now on a single page
- Ability to place the checkout process directly in shopping cart
- Disable unecessary fields like telephone, company name, fax, region, zip, etc
- Set a default shipping and payment method that will be preselected for the user
- Enable a checkbox for easy subscription to your newsletter
- Enable a checkbox for requiring terms and conditions (and display in non-obtrusive Javascript popup)
- Allow customer to enter a comment for the order while placing it
- Allow a different shipping address than billing (can be easily deactivated in backend)
- Change checkout title and description from administration interface
- Auto-update prices and totals (using AJAX) when choosing shipping/payment method
- Auto-detect users country with GeoIP technology
We’ve also chosen a dual-licensing model, where we offer a Standard edition for €190, and a Enterprise edition for €590. The Standard-edition has all the same features as the Enterprise-edition, with the GeoIP support being the only exception to that rule. The purpose of the Standard edition is not to offer a feature-stripped version, but rather use the Enterprise-edition for those customers who have a higher demand for support. That’s why the Enterprise-edition comes with free installation, free lifetime updates of the software, 1 hour of consultancy work to customize checkout to fit customers profile, as well as higher priority when it comes to new feature requests. Also, you need the Enterprise-edition to use the module for a multi-store setup across multiple domains.
There you have it – a quick introduction to our product! Hopefully you will find it interesting, and agree with us that this is a product that there is demand for in the current Magento market.
We will use this blog to write about general checkout and cart abondonment, and how that relates to Magento – and much more.