Billing Adress when sell A Digital Product

[HenrySheykin]

Hello Guys

Could you please advise how to remote unnecessary checkout step "billing address" as I distribute FREE digital products?

So for example there is a FREE Excel template I'd like people to download.

Why they should fill in "billing address" and how to avoid this step?

Henry

[Brie]

Hi, @HenrySheykin!

When you sell a digital product, the shipping address is automatically removed from the checkout. However, they still must input a billing address. This is used to help verify payment details and assess for any fraud risk, so it is not possible to remove this from the checkout. This helps prevent chargebacks and fraud, so as a merchant this is definitely something that you want to keep in your checkout. Hope that provides some clarity! Cheers. 

[HenrySheykin]

hello Brie but what if I provide FREE templates? for example - FREE Excel calculator Is there a way to skip the billing address?

[Brie]

Hi, @HenrySheykin!

I'm afraid this is still not possible for free products. This is because our checkout is a secured page and this is required to remain PCI compliant. A possible workaround for you would be to use an out of stock alert app or newsletter function to collect email addresses, to avoid using the checkout and send the downloads to customers directly. Let me know if you have any further questions about that. 

[HenrySheykin]

Hello Brie

So you suggest to use stock alert app or newsletter function.

Could you recommend how to implement these features?

As I understand I will be able to add some new button say "demo version" so the user can click, leave an email and some application should understand that this email has requested demo version of this product and send email with the email to the recipient.

Am I correct?

How to do this? 

[Brie]

Hi, @HenrySheykin!

I did a little more digging for you, and I believe a better option in this case would be to replace your "add to cart" button with a contact form, where the customer can submit their email address. You can find a tutorial for this here. Let me know what you think!  

[CarrieS]

I don't understand the compliancy aspect as it has been said many times by shopify that if we upgrade to shopify plus, we can edit our check-out page to not collect it?  How does compliancy magically disappear if we pay more?