Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] Welcome to the WP Builds podcast, bringing you the latest news from the WordPress community. Welcome your host, David Waumsley, nathan Wrigley.
Hello there and welcome to the WP Builds podcast. Once again, this is episode number 215 entitled Checkout Checkout WC for a customized woo commerce experience. It was published on Thursday, the 4th of February, 2021, my name's Nathan Wrigley, and a couple of small bits of housekeeping just before we begin, we are WP Builds and we produce lots of WordPress content each and every week we produce a podcast episode.
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Okay, let's get on with the main event today. I'm speaking with Clifton Griffin, all about his plugin called checkouts WC. Now this plugin assists WooCommerce and alters the. Checkout experience. The idea is borrowed heavily. As Clifton says from Shopify, it's a slimmed down easy to fill out three step process, which hopefully will give a little bit of a boost to your checkout.
The idea being that you take your existing customers and just convert a few more percent of them because the whole process is so frictionless. He talks to us today about why he built the plugin and of course all about the features and the benefits that you can get once you've acquired the plugin.
Speaking of acquiring it, you can actually get 15% off the plugin. If you go to the show notes to do with this podcast episode, and you can see that there's a coupon code there. So remember 15% off Checkout WC, check it out in the show notes. I hope that you enjoy the podcast. Hello there. Thank you for joining us on the WP Builds podcast.
We've got to the interview at this point. We're talking today. Clifton Griffin. I haven't actually asked if that's how you pronounce your name, but it's so sublimely straightforward. I'm guessing I've got it right. Is that right? That's right. Yeah. And you're based in Virginia, North America. And he's going to be talking to us today about a product that he's got in the WordPress space called Checkout WC.
As I always like to do at the beginning of the podcast, I'm going to say you may work. You may like to pause right at this second and go to Checkout WC. Dot com have that page on, then come back, click on pause and you can follow along with what we're doing. You can actually look at the pricing page as we're going and so on.
Check out WC, what is it? Clifton? What's the point of it?
Clifton Griffin: [00:04:01] Yeah, check out. WC is a drop-in solution for WooCommerce that replaces your checkout page. So replaces the version that maybe is in your theme, or just the default checkout page design that comes from WooCommerce core with a multi-step really beautifully designed featureful checkout page but the goal being to increase conversions and Provide more delightful experiences for your customers.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:04:27] Okay. Thank you. So if I was to let's say that forgetting pricing and all of that stuff, we'll come onto that later. Let's say that I downloaded this plugin and I am really, sublimely ignorant of how WordPress works. What would be the, what would be the time? It would take me to get this going in a way which is meaningful to me, it would actually alter the checkout.
Do I have to go through many hoops? Do I have to go through a whole bunch of settings or can I literally install it? Activate it and.
Clifton Griffin: [00:04:54] The ladder. We've tried to make it as easy to use as possible. A lot of solutions in this space are more, they lean more towards page builders and we try to be much more opinionated than that.
When you activate it, we look up your, for instance, we grab your logo from your WordPress logo settings. And we set that up as your logo, you can make that. You can change it later. But it's there for you to use and all the basics are set up for you. It should just work. Of course it's an e-commerce site, so you want to make sure you test it.
You don't want to just. Activated on your life site and assume everything's good. That's a great way to lose sales. But there's no, the customization really comes down to your preferences. It's not make a bunch of decisions to use it. We set good defaults that we think. Most customers should use, and then you can tweak it beyond that
Nathan Wrigley: [00:05:45] in terms of customization, padding and margins and all that sort of stuff.
We'll put all of that to one side, but probably what most people will be interested in, is the sort of colors and whether or not it brings along for the ride, the theme colors that you've chosen, I'm guessing to some extent it will.
Clifton Griffin: [00:06:01] Yeah. With naming colors it's interesting because there's not really a standard interface to get those, everything does it different.
You have themes that have completely custom kind of page builders and admin setting panels built in. Each of our themes has default colors and if you go to our design settings, there's just color pickers that you can choose. So you can, and just a few minutes set your brand colors and you'll be good to
Nathan Wrigley: [00:06:23] go.
Okay. Thank you. Now, obviously there's a lot of people in who listened to this podcast who are WordPress users. In fact, I'd venture to say all of them I'll hurt press users, but some of them may be maybe heavy users of WooCommerce. Maybe some of them have explored it a little bit. But th there's a problem with the WooCommerce checkout experience, clearly in your estimation, if you've taken the time to create and release a plugin, which solves those problems, do you want to just run through what the limitations are with commerce, that sort of default checkout experience what's up with it.
What needed to be improved?
Clifton Griffin: [00:06:57] Yeah, that's a great question. We're commerce is incredibly powerful. One of the best things about is that you can do just about anything you want with it. Where it gets a little weak is in the particulars of how it looks when you first install it.
The product pages are pretty good. The cart page is very functional where I saw the biggest. Need in the e-commerce space is the checkout page. Because it's really the most important page for most stores because it's really where sales are made or broken. I think the estimates are 70 to 80% of customers abandon their cart.
That means they took the step of, they went to your site, they looked at your products, they liked them enough to click, add to cart. They get to the checkout page, what is stopping them from continuing at that point. And I think if you're just using the default design. You're very likely to lose a lot of customers that you could potentially keep, just because it's very it's robust.
It works well, but it's extremely utilitarian. It's not pleasing to look at the sequence of fields that you fill in and the steps you take are. I'm sorry, a zigzag, you start with the billing information on the left and then you have to decide, okay, do I want to use a different shipping address?
You check that box. Now there's fields on the right and you're zigzagging your way down, so there's not a clear sequence of steps. So what we try to do with check out WC which we borrowed. Heavily from Shopify guys design, I, don't make any, I don't try to hide that.
It's very obvious. But what we try to do is keep people in a single domain of knowledge. So on the first step we just ask for your shipping address and your email address, and then when you click next we present the shipping methods and so you pick a shipping method and then the third tab is about payment and that's also where we show the ability to define a separate.
Billing address, but by default, we just take your shipping address. So what this does is basically it gives people the feeling of progress. So when you're on step two, you can see at the top, Oh, I've only got one more step to go. It also just reduces confusion because you're not being asked to consider 50 fields all at the same time we're taking.
A select number of those fields and showing them to you that are all in the same category of information. So when you're entering that address, you're not thinking is this the address that with my bank, that's tied to my credit card. It's very clear. This is the shipping address. So we're trying to really reduce that friction.
You know what, like I said, design-wise even process-wise we did steal a lot from Shopify and we were inspired by them heavily. But we also simultaneously have tried to stay up with the banner checkout user testing reports and really look for opportunities to go further. And there's a lot of functionality we've added on top of that.
Is all in that same vein of trying to automate everything we can and really reduce friction to as near zero as we can get. Cause that's going to lead to more sales in
Nathan Wrigley: [00:10:02] terms of do the, sort of the things that will commerce have got wrong. If you like for want of a better word, is it simply a legacy of WooCommerce?
Not. Keeping up with the times that is to say that if we were to roll back the clock, I don't know. Let's say let's play five years out of thin air. We were to go back five years. What will commerce checkout experience have been up to scratch at that point? And is it simply that rival platforms and you mentioned Shopify, which obviously you say you borrowed heavily.
So if you've. Use Shopify you'll have a very good idea of what this is like. Is it this that they've innovated and will commerce has stood still? Or how does it work that will come as this giant Leviathan of a platform? Haven't got this stuff already in there.
Clifton Griffin: [00:10:45] Yeah, that's a good question. I, I think that when this default checkout page was conceived of, it probably was.
Much more up to date and look and feel and just adhering to the norms of the day. I think the biggest challenge is they've got 4 million stores and countless themes that have their own extensions of those templates. And it's really hard for them to make opinionated aggressive changes without potentially breaking millions of stores.
So they have to be really thoughtful and considerate about how they do that. We don't have to be as careful because we're targeting customers who care about this stuff. And we're doing it in a really opinionate way. We actually don't even load your theme on the checkout page by default.
We just take over the markup from top to bottom cause we don't want to pull in all that baggage. And we also it's part of our philosophy of if someone's on the checkout page, the only thing that you should have them focus on is purchasing. They shouldn't be looking at your header with a thousand links to all of your other products.
All of those links are potential ways for them to exit the cart and never come back. So it's e-commerce is really hard. So I don't really fault them. I think it would be hard for them to have a out of the box solution that is as optimized it's a tough landscape.
Yeah. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:04] Just on that point, I just wonder if, obviously you've heavily invested in this now. You've clearly spent a lot of development hours and no doubt sunk some money as well into all of this. And and there is a an element, there is a chance that that will commerce could do.
To you, what you've done to will commerce that they could turn around in a couple of weeks and, literally come out with something which is akin to what you've got here. Just, and again, stepping to one side, a lot of it, just that kind of stuff, worry you, the fact that you don't have a control over that stuff.
And you've obviously spent ages building this and it might all crumble around your feet, if will commerce decide to amend their own cart.
Clifton Griffin: [00:12:42] Yeah. That is a very legitimate risk right now I think it's a pretty low risk. For the same reason, I think they're not really aggressively updating their own designs.
I think that they build a monster that's too big to control in some ways. But I do see movements where, some of those movements may not be extremely friendly to outside competition the use of they just rolled out with commerce payments.
And I think that, they're steering people into their own payment platform. So you have to ask how. Friendly, will they be to other payment platforms over time? It's an open question. We haven't really seen anything to indicate that they're making a big change there.
But they also came out recently with a beta of a kind of Gutenberg style checkout page. That's based on a block. And it's a lot better probably than the current checkout page, but it has. Significant limitations. Only works with e-commerce payments or Stripe right now, I think and it's not necessarily, it doesn't really even fix.
The acknowledged problems with their current checkout page. There's a get hub issue that kind of goes in depth of, here's all the sort of inefficiencies in the user experience of that page. And I don't really think it necessarily addresses those at least not all of them, part of me does wonder is this strategy of moving towards a block system?
Trying to consolidate power, in some sense, I really don't know the answer. I asked their team about it in one of their weekly chats and they said we don't, it's an experiment. We don't really know where we're going with this block layout approach to the checkout page. But part of me also thinks you're investing a lot of time for an experiment.
So I think there's probably a bigger play, but I hope that if they do roll out something like that, that they. Maintain backwards compatibility for cause it's not reasonable that, even developers are going to become experts in react. I think PHP templates, the templates we're all familiar with customizing that are really easy to customize provide enormous benefits for developers, whether you're a, a late developer, maybe an integrator who just mostly takes.
Things off the shelf and put them together, maybe tweaks a few things, or you're a hardcore developer. It's faster when you just have a kind of standard templating practices that we're all used to. So no one can really tell the future, but it is, it's something that we're keeping an eye on. And I hope that, they'll acknowledge that.
One of the reasons they have 4 million stores is because of how easy it is to customize and that they won't take any sort of anti-competitive actions there, but it's something that we have to keep an eye on, for sure. And there is. Some amount of risk there. Yeah. I'm not sure, but it would be well,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:15:28] yeah.
Obviously, yeah, it's an unknown. You just have to, nobody would build anything if there wasn't some Madeline element of risk. I'm sure. So let's,
Clifton Griffin: [00:15:35] let's move now to worst case scenario. We'll just fork. Woo. Commerce. Not really. I would never do that, but maybe
Nathan Wrigley: [00:15:45] you mentioned earlier that. 70 to 80% of of abandonment happens at the cart stage.
They've got the cart filled up with stuff that they've done it. That is an extraordinary number. Actually, when I think about that, because the time taken often to get the cart full, and I don't have any data on this, but, th. Probably browse for minutes, possibly longer to get the cart full.
And you're just having a little bit of play. It's a bit like window shopping. You wander into the shop and you just look at all the shirts and the blouses and the trousers and all of that. And you never ended up walking out with anything actually bought and paid for it. It's the same here, but 80% is extraordinary.
That's a lot of window shopping. Specifically, do you have any metrics on the things that you have implemented, which kind of turn that curve a little bit towards the sellers, in the seller's favor. And are we talking about massive gains that you can point to, or are we just really just massaging little incremental wins here and there?
In other words to paraphrase my question how much better is the conversions with your car?
Clifton Griffin: [00:16:46] Yeah that's a career question. We have information from customers. It's anecdotal, think one of our testimonials they saw a increase of a, let's see right here, 17% nice versus the checkout page, the reason before.
That means for every hundred let me try to do math here, live on the air. That's significant, and that's much easier if you can increase, if you can capture 17% more of the customers who are already on your site, that added something to the cart that get to the checkout page, if you can capture 17% more of them that's a lot easier than bringing a lot more traffic to your site.
There's a. I don't remember who said this, it's doubling your conversion rate, from 1% to 2%. Is a lot easier than doubling the number of people that come to your site. But that's the same metric, right? At the end of the day, you're, you've doubled your sales.
So that's, it's really where we're operating. And one of the things that is on our list is to do some case studies. We're working with a content partner that is good at that stuff, and we're going to connect them to some customers who are willing to talk about their experience and really try to get some more Anecdotal.
Yes. But real life experience of this is how we improved our right person.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:18:05] It feels like that would be an absolute easy win. If you had to, categorical data that you could point to and say, typically you implement the solution. Even if you don't customize it too much, you're up for 5% or 12% or whatever it may be.
The truth is. There's nobody listening to this podcast who hasn't had a bad experience in e-commerce WooCommerce aside, we've all been to those antiquated stores where the actual, the shop experience itself was as expected. You browse around and you click on buttons and the cart fills up, and then you go to the cart and you have.
Every intention of buying, literally you're committed to buying and the car just kills you, you're literally, it just won't work. I can't get to active, actively be inside that box on my mobile phone, or it's just, something's not right. It's asking me too many questions. There's no way I'm giving them this information.
So I'm guessing that's it. You're just tweaking, massaging little things. Cutting out the extraneous stuff, speeding things up automatically looking up certain things, maybe making it easier so that you can go back and amend things. So let's drill down specifically. You mentioned quite a few of these things at the beginning.
If we hit it, let's say that we've been to an, a WooCommerce shop and we've put some widgets into the checkout and we then decide we're going to buy. And we end up at the first hurdle that you're presenting us with. So you've hijacked, WooCommerce's checkout procedure. What is the quickest that you can give us to get from from hitting the ch the checkout, the cart button to actually purchasing what's the fastest way that we can do that with a WC checkout.
Sorry, check out
Clifton Griffin: [00:19:36] WC. So the fastest way would be if you're using Stripe and you've enabled Apple pay we're going to put that button right up top. And when you click that button, I use it every time I can. It's. By far the fastest way to check out just because there's no password, it's literally your fingerprint or your face.
You are it using cards that are already stored in your Apple wallet addresses that are already available, so you don't have to type in anything. You just. Click the button, authenticate it and you're done. Can I just interrupt
Nathan Wrigley: [00:20:06] at this point because I'm not an Apple user and I have no, no insight into how this system works, but from everything that you've described, it sounds like voodoo.
It's just pure magic. Does it suck? Yeah. I've used, Google's. Rival cause I have an Android phone, but I've only used that in bricks and mortar stores. I don't think I've ever enabled the option or rather use that option when I've seen it on a, an online store, but just run us through that process.
So you click the Apple button. Does Apple somehow surrender other details apart from the payment information? Will it pre-fill I dunno, shipping addresses and stuff like that, or is that, have I just jumped the gun? Sorry.
Clifton Griffin: [00:20:42] No, it, it actually bypasses the entire checkout page. When you click it, the browser brings down a kind of a native OSPF, modal that lists, your shipping address that they pull from your contact information to tied to your.
Apple account the card the default payment card that's in your wallet. You can click on it and change it, but you don't have to enter any card numbers and it pulls the shipping methods from the site. So it's all right there. And once you click pay it just goes straight to the thank you page.
So it doesn't, it's not like PayPal where you log into PayPal and then it takes you back to the site and everything's prefilled, and then you hit complete No, you can skip that part with PayPal. But that's generally how it works. Yeah. It's it's really, it just takes over the whole process. So that's,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:21:26] you've basically achieved the whole thing.
There's two buttons. You're at the car, you click the Apple button and then you click a confirm button once you've just scanned through and checked everything's okay. And you're done. So what's that. 20 seconds maybe.
Clifton Griffin: [00:21:40] Yeah. And that works best if you are adhering to the philosophy that we're trying to instill on our customers, which is don't ask for anything that you don't absolutely.
So you may want to send your customer a birthday card on their birthday with a discount code or something. That's a great. Idea. It's a nice impulse. Probably even works really well. There's a better time to ask them for their birthday then on the checkout page, because every single field that you ask them to fill in even optional fields, it's just a little barrier you're putting between them and a final sale.
So we recommend not, if it, if a field is optional, you should probably remove it. An exception would be like address line two for apartment since suites and things like that. But firstly, everything else don't have company on there unless you need company. Are you going to use that information?
Is it going to be part of the shipping label? No, drop it. There's no reason to have it. It's just one more thing the customer has to see and make a decision about and the other really big thing that we try to. We have, we try to have really good defaults here. We're a little bit more opinionated on this than on some other stuff, is that when it comes to accounts we have a philosophy that says if you're going to offer accounts, you should register them automatically.
So don't make them. Pick a new password on the page, just generate a password for them. This is a feature built into WooCommerce already where essentially it'll generate a password and email it to them upon a successful purchase. Trying to pick a password is one of the most problematic steps in the checkout page, because if you're trying to be good and secure.
Yeah. And you're like most people who are not in tech and don't have a password manager. Now you're trying to come up with some good password, so you have to really put some effort into it, right? Even the password
Nathan Wrigley: [00:23:31] manager is just a killer on my part. You know how many times you're trying to keep your finger hovering on that?
Copy paste over it. Yeah. It's not fun.
Clifton Griffin: [00:23:40] And there's another problem, which is, we also tell people to always allow guest orders whenever possible. So even if someone already has an account. Let them check out as a guest, the next time they're purchasing. Because customers shop at lots of stores and they may not remember if they have an account with you and they don't want to be bothered with trying to remember their password.
They just want to make the sale. Yeah, if you, sorry. Yeah, go ahead.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:24:04] . He's
Clifton Griffin: [00:24:04] here. If you're used to selling subscriptions or something like that, you may have to have an account and that we also try to help out there where once you enter your email address, we'll do a quick lookup.
In the back end to see if you have a user account and let the customer know, Hey, it looks like you have an account. Do you want to log in? So we try to minimize the friction there as much as possible.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:24:25] W with that, just a couple of things, anecdotally from being a user of these things.
Yeah. The password managers are a killer. Yes. I will always check out with a guest registration if that's okay on offer. It's very often, even if I know I've gotten the key because, I just like to keep my information to myself. But the mobile thing is just so beguiling and compelling. Do you know if Do you know, if this, you mentioned Apple pay, obviously I said that I'm a Google pay user.
Do you have an integration with Google pay? Is that even an option that's available or is that coming down the pike?
Clifton Griffin: [00:24:58] Yeah, that's all handled by gateways. So Stripe has a Google pay button. I've seen it. I am not really super familiar with Google pay. I know it works, but I assume it's very similar to Apple pay where it's short-circuiting the process and using information that Google already has about you to minimize the number of steps required to purchase and on mobile that's especially important. So
Nathan Wrigley: [00:25:23] Stripe thing, if you've enabled it in Stripe, it will come across into your checkout. Will it, if Google pay was enabled and Stripe, it we're good to go there.
It will be alongside the Apple one if you've enabled that as well.
Clifton Griffin: [00:25:34] And the same for Braintree. Yep. So I don't think the official Braintree gateway has this functionality, but there's one out there by payment plugins. Who's a friend of the plugin. We're working with him to make sure our systems work perfectly together.
But his actually Includes Apple pay, it includes Google pay, all that stuff.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:25:54] Okay. Okay. Let's imagine though that we're we're slightly more Luddite than than that. And we've got to, we've got to use some sort of, I don't know, credit card or PayPal or something like that. And you mentioned earlier that, the best way is the quickest way.
Let's get back to that. If we've got to actually input details, what is it that you're doing to speed this up and keep it slim line so that, conversions are not lost?
Clifton Griffin: [00:26:17] Yeah, we have a couple of features there that are try to go above and beyond. Out of the box. What we do is when you enter your postcode which we've ordered the fields to maximize the usefulness of this.
So we have country and then postcode than state and city. As soon as you enter your postcode, we do a lookup and we auto fill in your state and city public information. There's no reason to make. People fill in three fields when they can fill in one. Yep. There are some limitations. This, and I'm sorry to say, this affects you in the UK.
There are countries that, for reasons I can't fathom have copyrighted their postal code information. Yeah. So it's illegal to. Maintain a database like that. So our zip service does have limitations when it comes to I think particularly UK postcodes. But I think there's some other European countries that fall into this.
I'm apologizing on behalf
Nathan Wrigley: [00:27:17] of everybody.
Clifton Griffin: [00:27:22] But for those people we do have Google maps address auto complete. It takes a little bit more set up From the merchant's perspective, but I think it's well worth it. As you type, it's looking up addresses that are located near you and you click an address and it'll fill in the whole thing for you.
So wait,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:27:39] that's a great alternative. What you see a map and you, this is a confirmation thing, or this is a way of actually putting your address into the fields.
Clifton Griffin: [00:27:47] It's w as your title into the address field, it starts showing you suggested addresses from Google. Places, I guess it's number there. Yep.
So that's one way to do it. And we also have support for, a lot of sores are like, Hey, we only sell in Canada. Can we make sure the addresses are only from Canada? And so we have an easy way for merchants to define a list of countries that they want to prioritize and Google places as they're typing.
So that's a great, that covers the UK covers the whole world. It is a premium feature that requires our middle tier higher tier. But we think if you can do that, you should probably do that.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:28:29] Okay. Anything else?
Clifton Griffin: [00:28:32] Yeah. So beyond that, we just one thing we're adding right now, for example, just to show you just like how we approach this stuff and what we're having the pipeline.
We've been working on this for. Two and a half, three years. And the version we're just about to release has a feature we're called calling user matching. And so this gets back to that account dilemma of, I don't remember if I have an account or I prefer to use a guest account just because I don't want to, mess with my password manager.
What we do is essentially if you have an account and you place a guest order we will look up at the time, the order is purchased, whether an account exists for that email address. And if it does, we'll tie that order to that account so that when you log into my account later, you'll see that order with all your other orders.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:29:19] So regardless of whether you've you say you are trying to be anonymous in a certain state, you're not logging in, but it's the, you are helpfully matching up orders with pre-existing customers automatically.
Clifton Griffin: [00:29:32] Because what happens a lot? I've seen it with my clients is they will get an email from a customer and the customer will say, Hey, you know what the heck I purchased something from you.
I'm just trying to find the order. It's not under my account. And then we look it up and yeah. Every single time what happened is that the customer thought they had logged in. They didn't, they forgot. And so now they're wondering where that order is, but it's. Kind of Ireland, it's on an Island by itself, away from their other orbs type account.
So we match it up. And the other thing we do is in this feature is when you register an account for the first time during checkout, we will look up to see if there's any guest orders in the past that matched that email address. And if they do, we pull those, we associate those old orders with the new account.
So it's all about, it's about friction reduction. Accounts are obnoxious for customers to juggle. They don't remember if they have them. They don't want to log into them. But they do want somewhere that they can go to see all their orders. And this is a nice way for us to essentially just automate away some of that pain when somebody logs in and they see that order and they're like, Oh, that's amazing.
They recognized that I use the same email address now I'm seeing it, yeah. So we're just trying to create delight and surprise and also it just, it helps merchants. They're going to get fewer support tickets asking. Why an order isn't showing up in my account or things along those lines.
One of
Nathan Wrigley: [00:31:03] The things that I noticed from actually, if you haven't done so already, just pause, go to checkout w WC and assuming that the sorry, wc.com. Assuming that the the website itself hasn't changed, there is a what I'm going to say is an animated GIF of the process on a typical. Flow.
And one of the things that I really like, it's really clear, you've got everything happening on the left and then, the resultant stuff happening on the right. So you can see how things are being updated and what have you, and what the total is that it's all very nice. It's just the use of space, the way that stuff gets out of the way.
And this one. Fairly minimal UI. Everything is done within the same space. So once something's completed, it just disappears. It's gone from your viewport. And I can imagine that this would be really useful on mobile. One of the things which frustrates me a lot is the endless scroll of the checkout on mobile, where, it's just a long list of things to complete.
I'm guessing. That this has been optimized for mobile, such that, you try to keep as much on that one screen as possible. And again, stuff gets out of the way. Once you've completed that step.
Clifton Griffin: [00:32:05] Yeah. So I'm on mobile that writes side that lists your cart and your totals, all that stuff gets collapsed into an accordion at the top of the screen.
That's a show order summary. So you click it, it'll show your what's in the cart with the details of the subtotal, shipping taxes, all that stuff. But when it's closed, you just see your total. Yeah. So it's a way for us to get all that information out of the way. And keeping people focused on what we want them to be doing, which is filling out the form.
Yeah. Yeah. Carry on. Say another thing that we didn't really talk about, but it's in that same vein of, we want to keep people on the checkout page is just how many times does somebody, or, add something to the cart they go to checkout and they, at the last second say, you know what.
I don't think cousin Greg is gonna want one of these shirts. So I'm just gonna change that, three shirts to two shirts and they realize, Oh, I can't do it from here. I have to leave. Check out, go back to the cart page, make the change, then go back to checkout. Yup. So one of our features that we add to our premium license tiers is cart editing which gives you a quantity toggle where you can make adjustments like that, right from the checkout page.
And it's all about trying to keep you where you're at. Keep you focused on completion. Give you a sense of progress. Because we want to get every sale that we can for our merchants. So
Nathan Wrigley: [00:33:24] wait, what, where does that appear then? Is that so let me just be clear. You've got this functionality cart editing where you can literally increment or decrement the amount of stuff in your cart.
We're not talking about modifying host wholesale, the actual product itself. You just, you're just adding one or taking one away and so on. Where does that? So that's before. The sort of payment section you do that their quick confirmation up, down, up, down, get it just right. And then you're off to the payment section.
I've got that, right? Or is this in some way opening at
Clifton Griffin: [00:33:53] the same time, the screenshot on the site, on the right side is your cart items. Let's find this right underneath it.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:34:01] Yeah. Okay. So just to explain if you're not lucky enough to be able to watch this on the website. So all of the stuff like the payment details and which card you're going to select, that's on the left.
It's about. Three-fifths of the UI and on the right to the remaining two fits is promo codes, coupon codes, and the total subtotal shipping and so on and so forth. But yeah, there it is. There's the actual items in the cart with a little plus minus icon. How's that on mobile? It does that,
Clifton Griffin: [00:34:27] does that, that works on mobile too.
And it is collapsed by default in that order summary section, because, we're just trying to reduce the length. Mobile is really cumbersome to work with when you have so many required fields and things to do yeah. We hide it all up top and it says show order summary. So when you click it, it just expands down and you can access all that same functionality.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:34:48] You could have gone through the entire checkout poke process, except the complete order button. Anything before that moment, you can alter the quantities in the car and it will adapt and you can then click complete order. Exactly. Nice. Yeah. That is a really nice feature. I like that a lot. I confess that at somehow.
Pass me by. But there it is. Yeah, that's really nice. So the important question which will be on everybody's minds is a, is what are the tiers? Is there a free tier? What's the cost of the different plans? Fairly typical pricing. You've got three tiers. Firstly, is there a free version anywhere or are we only
Clifton Griffin: [00:35:23] premium?
There is not a free version. We've we've done freemium before. We actually have some freemium products We love it. But for this plugin it's really, it takes a lot of effort to make it work to keep it working to provide really responsive support for it. And we just.
I don't think it would be wise for our premium customers to have a free tier. It would just be a major distraction to have to provide support for all of those free customers with the hopes that they eventually upgrade. So what we tell customers is that we really want customers who are all in that are joining us together on this, that we're going to work on it to make it better.
Together. In, in that same spirit, we have auto renewing subscriptions attached to everything. We do limit functionality if your subscription expires. Because we don't, it, it takes a lot of work, like I said and we want to, we don't want to be supporting someone who bought the plugin four years ago.
Who's no longer. Actively involved with us. So yeah, we're trying to learn from advanced content templates. It just moved to that model. I think commerce.com just moved to that model. Easy digital downloads is already there. They'll a lot of great products died in the model of selling lifetime licenses and giving away too much for free.
So we're trying to protect. The product to really make sure that it's there for our customers. I
Nathan Wrigley: [00:36:47] just think there's so many arguments to be had in this space. Whether or not there should be a free tier or whether it should be, premium only, I think it's up to you, right?
It's your product. If you want to have a free tier, have a free tier, if you don't want to have free tier everybody's clear, let's just start with the startup plan, which incidentally. Gets you wanting stall for one 49 per year. Oh, speaking of like the free version there is of a fashion, a free version, it looks like on all the plans.
You've got a free seven day trial, so you don't have to throw how many up the money and then play with it and realize it's not to your liking. You got a free seven day option there. But you get one year of ups updates and support for that, for the startup plan, future standard features, standard means stuff.
So does it in that case? Yeah. Yeah,
Clifton Griffin: [00:37:34] essentially. Okay.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:37:35] And then we got that restricted. Okay. Got it. Okay. And then there are other things which are available on the larger plans. So we've got the growth plan at two, four, nine per year. This allows you five installs with the same year of support and updates, and you've got to, you've got premium features.
So this cart editing the address auto complete the thank you page, the order page, the one page checkout, that's all in the the growth. And then should you have a big agency? You might want to go for the developer plan, limiting you to 150 installs with all the features that I've just mentioned. Any other ones?
I didn't know. I think it's the same set of features. And then if you are truly gigantic, you can send them an email to a, to go for enterprise pricing for anything. If you've got 151 or more, if you need the enterprise plan. Yeah.
Clifton Griffin: [00:38:25] Lee plans to some customers like to. Start there. And then we'll upgrade to annual later to save a little bit on their annual costs.
And we offer 30 day refunds too. We realized that a product like this sometimes takes customers a while to experiment with it and play with it. And so if you ask for a refund, we're going to. We're not going to hold you over a barrel and make you force, force you to tell us how you tried your best to use it.
We're just going to give you the refund. Of course we'll offer to help out in any way we can, but bought products before where you go to request a refund and there's they point to texts in their refund that says, Hey, Oh yeah, unless you tried every way imaginable to make this work for you.
We can't offer an, a refund and I think that's just really draconian and Tara. So
Nathan Wrigley: [00:39:13] that's there's a really nice demo. Section to the website. So w sorry, check. I keep wanting to say WC checkout, wc.com forward slash demos. And you'll see, you've got you've got the option to modify the theme.
It's showing you the different ways that checkout can look. And this is, it's just showing you the images, so you can look at what the information page looks like. Look at what the shipping page looks like and the payment page, and the thank you page. And then underneath each of those images is a button called live demo.
And if you click on that, rather than looking at images, you can actually go and see what the checkout actually feels like. And there it is in all of its glory. Checkout WC.com forward slash demos. If you wanted to go and check those out and then obviously Checkout WC.com. If you feel like you want to get in, you want to get on board this and and check it out for yourself.
Anything we missed or any place on social. You want us to mention this is your moment to just basically Hoover up all the things that I,
Clifton Griffin: [00:40:08] yeah. I realized that we'd never really mentioned that there are four different kind of templates within Checkout WC. So four starting designs.
So if your store has a different look and feel, there's probably one that will match up pretty well with it. The other thing I wanted to mention, if I can, as I've created a discount code for WP Builds, we like it. Yeah. So it's just a WP Builds all one word and that'll get you 15% off. And that.
That discount follows you as long as you have your license. That's
Nathan Wrigley: [00:40:45] very nice. Thank you so much. That's it a really nice offer. Mentioning the themes that you've got. Forgive me if I've got these wrong, they're on the demos page as well. Great default theme. The future is theme, which is a bit more industrial, modern looking the theme, which is a bit of a nod to the shot.
Where
Clifton Griffin: [00:41:03] do I get that name?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:41:05] And the newest one in the bunch is the smooth and glassy glass, that team, which I have to say, I think is my favorite. There's something about that, that I like that. Yeah, check it out. And remember, as a Clifton, just said, if you want to avail yourself for 15% off, WP Builds, is the coupon code.
Will that have an expiry date or are you just going to let that one roll? Nope.
Clifton Griffin: [00:41:28] That will be available for all the time.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:41:30] Hey, that's great. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Go and check it out. Check out w c.com. Thanks for joining us today, Clifton.
Clifton Griffin: [00:41:38] Yeah, thanks for having me.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:41:40] I hope that you enjoyed that.
Absolutely fascinating chatting to Clifton Griffin this week about Checkout WC. Remember if this has piqued your interest, you can head over to the WP Builds.com website. Look at the show notes and there's a coupon code there to get you 15. Dean percent off. Check out WC. Thank you for that Clifton. If you've got any comments to make, you can make them on the podcast [email protected] or alternatively, why don't you head over to our Facebook group?
WP Builds.com forward slash Facebook. And you could make some comments there. The WP Bill's podcast was brought to you today by AB split test. Do you want to set up your AB split tests in record time, then you AB split test plugin for WordPress. We'll have you up and running in a couple of minutes. Use your existing pages and test anything against anything else.
Buttons, images, headers, rows, anything. And the best part is it works with element or Beaver builder and the WordPress block editor. You can check it out and get a free [email protected]. Okay. We shall be back next Thursday for another podcast episode. Why not join us at 2:00 PM UK time on Monday. WP Builds.com forward slash live or in the Facebook group.
WP Builds.com forward slash Facebook and join in the conversation over there. It's always a pleasure when people make those comments. If not, we'll see you at some point soon. Stay safe. Bye bye for now.
