During one of our initial brainstorming sessions, we got a list of current players in the WooCommerce Checkout Optimization space. There were a few but the only one worth mentioning is CheckoutWC. CheckoutWC is essentially ‘Shopify Checkout for WooCommerce’. Apart from implementing Shopify’s multi-step checkout style, they also have a neat ZIP lookup feature.
To achieve the Shopify-style checkout, it has been implemented as a stand-alone plugin — meaning, the style of the checkout page will not be affected by the themes’ styles. In other words, the checkout page will not reflect the store’s color scheme and branding. Instead, they offer 3 themes that one can choose from. But in all honesty, they are all the same essentially.
I didn’t want to take this approach because when users click on ‘Proceed to Checkout’ they would be presented with a totally different style of page and that kind of dissociation is not good for conversion. Instead we decided to implement the optimizations right in WooCommerce’s checkout template itself. This way users will have the control to enable/disable optimizations from the plugin’s settings page and we would alter the template files accordingly.
After about 3 months of development and another month of testing, we launched the public beta version of the plugin.
You can read more about how that was not the best decision and what we learned from it in the next post – Issues with templates.