Depending on what you are looking for in your ecommerce website there are plenty of plug-ins and add-ons that can help you enhance certain parts of your website for your visitors. One recent product that I’ve come across is called “OneStepCheckout” which was specifically designed for Magento ecommerce websites. If you are unsure what Magento is exactly, it’s an ecommerce platform allowing businesses to process ecommerce transactions and make sales online. The concept behind a one step checkout is that you reduce the number of steps needed to checkout of your ecommerce website in order to increase conversions and decrease your customers’ frustrations.
What I did like about this plug-in
The plug-in does what it says it’s going to do. There is sometimes nothing worse than getting a plug-in or technology activated on your website that doesn’t live up to the hype of what it claimed to do. This plug-in claims to reduce a 6 step checkout process down to a one step checkout process and it delivers.
One of the biggest if not the biggest problem in ecommerce today is shopping cart abandonment. This is a statistic that takes into account the number of people who started in the checkout process compared to the number of people of finished the checkout process and placed their order. What a one page checkout does or is supposed to do is decrease the number of shoppers who abandon their shopping cart because they are frustrated, give up somewhere in the process or are affected by performance.
Also, one step checkout processes enhance the customer’s experience which can drive up the conversion rate and if you bought this plug-in you’d be best to test it on your Magento ecommerce website.
This plug-in also gives you the ability to disable or enable certain fields quickly and easily including “Fax”, “Company Name”, “Terms and Conditions”, “Comments” and others. I am hoping to see them implement more customization aspects into future versions but here is what some companies have already done to customize and implement the OneStepCheckout plug-in into their everyday businesses.
What I didn’t like about this plug-in
It’s only available for Magento users which mean that if you are using another ecommerce platform to run your online business then you will not be able to use this plug-in. It’s a solid plug-in as you can see from the screenshots… Who wouldn’t want to use it on their ecommerce website?
Another point to consider is that it literally takes the checkout process from six steps to one step so if you wanted to customize a checkout process to say three steps this plug-in will not allow you to do that easily.
Because the plug-in doesn’t currently support adding custom fields having and using what are known as “Coupon”, “Promotion” or “Discount” codes when a customer checks out could pose an issue if this is something that your ecommerce business does currently and it is something that you should be aware of when buying this plug-in for your Magento ecommerce website
I was checking out the screencasts on the OneStepCheckout website and it makes mention multiple times of being able to use” GeoIP” which is a technology that allows you to base where a customer is globally using their IP address and fills in the blanks of the OneStepCheckout page using this information. If you are sold on this feature in particular you may be sad to hear (I know that I was) that GeoIP is only available on their “ENTERPRISE” version of this plug-in but if you need it then maybe you can justify spending the 590 Euros for the enterprise addition of OneStepCheckout
Why should you run out and buy this plug-in?
If you are running a Magento ecommerce website and you are looking to enhance the checkout process and increase those lower than expected conversion rates this plug-in will help you do that successful. The one page checkout collects the following information all in one step…
- Name and address information
- Shipping method information
- Payment method information
- “Review your order” information
… Lastly your customers will simply click the “Place Order” button and the one step checkout process is complete!
How much does One Step Checkout cost?
The Standard version of OneStepCheckout will cost you 190 Euros and includes most of the functionality that the enterprise version has except for GeoIP as I originally discussed, use of the plug-in on multiple domains within the same installation, Free support, 1 hour of technical customization help and only six months of free updates.
The Enterprise version of OneStepCheckout costs 590 Euros but for that you also get a lot of extras not included in the standard version including GeoIP, use of the plug-in on multiple domains within the same installation, Free support, 1 hour of technical customization help and UNLIMITED free updates and priority on requests for new features. This is well worth the money if you are using it on multiple Magento ecommerce websites or just want access to all the bells and whistles.
Update: Discount/Promo Code functionality – November 18, 2009.
I heard back from Jone Eide, the CTO (Chief Technical Officer) at OneStepCheckout who has this to say about the functionality if discount/promo codes when OneStepCheckout is being used…
I was getting a query from a customer today, which claimed that OneStepCheckout doesn’t support coupon/promo codes. That is actually incorrect. In Magento, the discount/promo code field is displayed in the cart, and not in the actual checkout. That’s the same for OneStepCheckout. You can still have a discount field in your cart, like it does by default, and when you enter OneStepCheckout, you will see the discount added and taken into account in the review part with the totals. It would be great if you can update this in your review. Sorry for the confusion.
Jone Eide, CTO OneStepCheckout
