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I’m well on my way to getting my site looking good, and have moved on to payment options.
When I test the paypal purchase of an image, I’m shown the checkout page which requires first and last name, address, phone number etc before you can progress to paypal.
No-one is going to give me that sort of information – I would certainly close the page if I was the buyer at this point. I can’t see where I can stop WooCommerce from asking for this information though.
Steve
I found this suggested piece of code that would be added to the function.php of the theme, which in my case is the Express theme. Would it be possible to add this and give us the ability to turn off the request for the address and phone number in the checkout page?
http://www.remicorson.com/woocommerce-hide-checkout-fields-for-virtual-products/
I’ll look into it Steve – as this would be a WooCommerce thing, there is likely a way to do it.
However, in my opinion, this shouldn’t be a problem in the slightest. You are creating a legal contract with anyone purchasing any of your images, and I personally would like to know exactly who I am licensing my image to. In fact, most customers (95% of them) understand and would probably feel more comfortable with this.
Remember, they are also trusting that all your images are actually yours – by creating a legally binding purchase system, it provides an added sense of security all around.
I would recommend against doing what you are suggesting, but will look into a way of doing it.
I found a happy medium: http://docs.woothemes.com/document/paypal-express-checkout/
With this, you can give them the option of just checking out directly via PayPal, which will give them the option of providing address information. Let me know if something like this would suffice. It is a paid plugin directly from WooCommerce, so there is a cost associated to it.
For PLUS users, note that this, along with a number of other premium WooCommerce plugins such as composite products and other checkout methods will be added to the PLUS server with the 2.0 release.
Thanks Robin, for looking into it. I normally do see who buys my images from the legacy site, but you see this in the Paypal email that is generated, not by the person entering information into my site. I fully agree about the legal contractual side, but then I have this worry that people have a fear of their personal information going adrift and giving it to an unknown site like mine could be seen as pretty risky behavior. Giving it to Paypal is a trusted route.
I don’t want to make a big thing of it, especially as there seems to be a plugin solution, but do you think the theme solution would also make sense? Adding it to the Express theme does not seem to be very difficult as far as I can understand things.
Steve
It can’t hurt to try that code out – give it a go and do a checkout. If all goes well, then you’re good. This is more of a plugin than a theme alteration, and if it doesn’t work just let me know and I can figure out why. But it looks like it should be good to go.
That should definitely work actually – it is referenced directly from WooThemes.
This was an easy fix. I downloaded the functions.php file from wp-content/themes/symbiostock-express/ and added the code to the end of the file. I can’t paste the code in here but if you go to this website:
http://www.remicorson.com/woocommerce-hide-checkout-fields-for-virtual-products/
and then find the comment from BFTrick dated January 3, 2015, he includes code that checks to see if the cart needs to know shipping details, and if it doesn’t need that, it hides requirement for address and phone number – a neat solution.
One learning lesson – there is nowhere that tells the buyer what is going to happen when they return from paypal. It would be nice to add some text here to explain the process. I hijacked the Paypal description in WooCommerce to add some brief explanation of the way they can download the file. A suggestion for the next release would be to allow us to customize some words on that checkout page if that is possible.
You can check out what it looks like at http://www.BackyardStockPhotos.net
Steve
Wow – that checkout experience is insanely fast. I may actually add this as an optional feature in 2.0 now because it works so much better than I thought it would.
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