Create a Page in Btween Cart and Checkout to ask Customer Questions?

[bryan76]

Been trying to find a solution to obtain more information from the customers in the checkout process to make for less friction since having them create an account is a lot of work just to get to see the shipping costs.

My crrent setup is they best I can come up with since Shopify does not allow us to make for a better checkout page and the information they ask is very minimal.  We need to know if it is a business or residential address, if they have a loading doc, need a liftgate, etc etc. 

We have a custom registration page for a new account now.  But having the customer click checkout just to be redirected to a login page, then register for a new account.  then back to the cart then to checkout to enter address and see the shipping is not a very good experience and we are losing most sales in this process.  

Since there are zero options unless we are on Plus (we are a year old company and cannot afford Plus) to customize the checkout page we are thinking of a way to add a page that looks similar to the checkout in between the cart and checkout instead of the register for a new account process.  

Does anyone have any ideas for doing this?  or any other solution.  We need a professional site that has a sseemless checkout process similar to our competitors.  So we are not considering and strange, round about, sloppy ways of doing it this.

We are a bit upset we chose Shopify at this point to say the least.  We are open to considering other platforms that are more for professional businesses as regular Shopify seems to be far behind our competitor's platforms like Magenta, erc. 

[LuffyOnePiece]

Hi @bryan76 ,

In Shopify, we can't add a page between the cart and checkout pages. What we can do is when a customer clicks on the checkout button, we can redirect it to new page with all the custom field. After customer fills all the data , we then redirect to the checkout page.

Another alternative will be adding all the fields in the cart page and make all those field required and pass data as a cart attribute.

Let me know if you need further assistance.

Thank you

[bryan76]

appreciate your response. 

we already have a custom registration page with all the questions.  the redirect is the problem.  all of our competitors have the additional questions on the checkout page. 

how would we add the questions in the cart, have that information stored in Shopify and pass it to the checkout?

Thanks!

[LuffyOnePiece]

Hi @bryan76 ,

Can you please send the preview URL of the store so that I can assist you on?

Thank you

[bryan76]

just looking for answers / suggestions on this thread.  no need for sharing URLs as this is a more general question that would be a solution for any shopify website

[LuffyOnePiece]

Hi @bryan76 ,

You can use cart attribute.

https://ui-elements-generator.myshopify.com/pages/cart-attribute

Thank you

[tim]

Well, Magento would be quite a lot dearer I believe.

Wonder what you mean by "strange, round about, sloppy ways of doing it".

I believe cart attributes would be your best option here. 

Many current themes use cart popup and direct to checkout from there. 

Depending on the data you want to collect (whether it's just a couple of checkboxes or much more) you can either add these to your cart popup, or, probably a better option -- use cart page to collect this information (naturally "a page before checkout"). 

Then you can use Flow to update customer account/address based on these cart attributes to fetch this information for later orders by the same customer.

[bryan76]

I will look into your suggestions.  maybe I can make the cart page look more like the checkout page, ask questions and have shipping fees on that page.   do either of your solutions (attributes or pop up) allow the customers to create an account in the process?  or is that really not a questions as they have an account automatically once they make the purchase?   (I have always had accounts turned on so not sure how it works if I turn it off)

[tim]

No. Yes.

I would rather recommend keeping the default Shopify ways of account creation. Makes your (and your devs) lives easier 🙂

Basically, to keep it simple -- you need to collect information related to the order?

Wonderful, cart attributes is a way to pass structured information to your cart and then to the order. 

If customer is already logged in, we can fetch this data from customer object (if present) and show as default selections on a cart page.

When order is placed, we can use Flow app to get these cart attributes and update customer object for future use, by this time there must already be a customer object created.

It's more about the way we collect the attributes and present it to visitors. They may think it's a new page, but it will be just a modal on the same product page. Or just add them to the default cart form on the cart page if it's used. 

[bryan76]

I am definitely not doing this on the product page.  I have a custom registration page already intact that works just fine putting the attributes into the custom notes.  I use these notes fairly oftem.

this is all very convoluted. my only though is to restructure the cart to have the questions and display shipping fees.  other than that I may still leave shopify.