42 Step Check Out Process

[RobboNJ69]

Ok. So it wasn't exactly 42 steps, but wow. For a company that puts out such amazing material your shopping cart (and website) are disappointing. I guarantee you'd sell a lot more if the shopping experience was better.

[Chris Lambertz]

Hi Robert, we have plenty of ideas kicking around to improve our site and shopping experience. If you have any specific suggestions for what you would like to see happen on paizo.com, please let us know.

[PathlessBeth]

You know how on Amazon you can filter books by genre, author, format, and other tags? It's helpful for finding products if you have some ideas of what you want, but don't already have an exact product in mind.

Just as an example, I'm going to quote another forumite who commented about what he wants from the store on another recent thread:

Steve Geddes wrote:

I can find stuff when I know what I want. However, I'm more likely to think "I'm running a game in Varisia - what products would be useful" and I find it hard to browse the site for that kind of thing. The same issue arises if I want to look at "third party game worlds" or similar. I'm pretty much faced with a huge number of PF-compatible publishers, most of whom have only put out a handful of product.

One of your main competitor in the RPG-online-retail market has a feature close to what Steve Geddes is requesting. OneBookShelf allows you to filter products by format (PDFs vs printed books vs cards vs posters etc), by rule system, by product type, and by genre. So, using the example in the quote, Steve could search for Campaign settings for Pathfinder in printed book format (and could narrow things down further with other filters if he wanted.)

Caveat: all such filters are dependent on the publisher accurately tagging their own products. Of course it is in their interest to make their product easy to find for its intended audience, but with a publishing scene with as many competitors as the RPG market, not everyone is perfectly consistent.

The other thing Steve Geddes asked for could be accomplished with another OBS feature. For this one, it's worth looking at OBS' site dedicated to WotC products (formerly dndclassics, now dmsguild). Dmsguild gives you the same filter options that other OBS domains do, plus one more: filter by campaign setting. For example, you could filter your search to adventures set in Planescape. You can then add search terms (or additional filters) within those categories.

An analogous feature you could add to the Paizo store would be the ability to filter products by the region(s) of Golarion they focus on. Ideally you could combine such a filter with other store filters (e.g., the level range on the adventure finder) to look for the type of product you want in the campaign setting you want.

And uh, Steve Geddes, I'm sorry for using your examples without asking, it's just that your example requests were so good that I felt better using yours than making up my own examples.

[Canadian Bakka]

I concur with 137ben's point about having more options in narrowing down the products available through the website. I know that one thing I would like to be able to do on the Paizo website is filtering out adventure paths and adventure modules based on terrain types and/or genres used within the product.

For example, if I wanted to search for any adventure that takes place in an underground setting or is a murder mystery, I really cannot search (using the Search prompt on the left side) for adventure products on the Paizo website (to the best of my knowledge) without snagging a whole bunch of other irrelevant products (i.e., they are not actual adventures or may not actually be primarily an underground adventure or a murder mystery, as per the examples above).

I could search Paizo's own adventures and check them out by level or by region in Golarion, but that can be very time-consuming. DriveThruRPG does have an incredible amount of filtering/sorting (via tags) but the ridiculous number of products that meets any given criteria can be be staggering and daunting to plow through sometimes, heh. ;)

It's difficult to come up with specific features and options that consumers want to see on the website, but I think that having more options to narrow down product searches is probably a good thing.

CB out.

[RobboNJ69]

Chris Lambertz wrote:

Hi Robert, we have plenty of ideas kicking around to improve our site and shopping experience. If you have any specific suggestions for what you would like to see happen on paizo.com, please let us know.

Thanks for replying Chris - Sorry it's taken me so long to respond myself. I don't think I'm getting email notices about the thread. Anyway - I think the sorting & filtering suggestions are awesome, but I was specifically talking about the check out process.

The cart works great. Its when you go to check out that the problems start.

Its the 4 boxes. "Steps in red must be completed before your order can be processed. Steps in green have already been completed or contain default information, but you may update that information at any time. Steps in gray have not yet been visited."

Step 1 is black, but I've already went past that, shouldn't it be green? Step 2 is in grey - internet-wide, grayed out buttons say "disabled". 3 is in red, but don't I also have to confirm the order (X) and select shipping (2) before the order can be processed; shouldn't they be red too? Or did I miss something and I can't click on those yet?

The X for confirm the order is confusing - "X" usually means delete or cancel. When I do enter my payment information, step 3 is in black, but your instructions say green is complete - did I complete it or was there an issue?

That sort of stuff is what I was talking about. Not sure why the unique check out process and not just use the standard request info and hit next. I know I'm nit-picking, but its is proven every little bit of confusion or every extra step increases your cart abandonment rate. Hence Amazon implementing their patented 'one click check out'. Even with out going to a one-click system, streamlining your checkout process even by 1 step can show an increase in sales. Here is a great article we reference all the time for our clients: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/40-checkout-page-strategies/

Thanks for listening - Keep up the great work at Paizo!

[graywulfe]

RobboNJ69 wrote:

Chris Lambertz wrote:

Hi Robert, we have plenty of ideas kicking around to improve our site and shopping experience. If you have any specific suggestions for what you would like to see happen on paizo.com, please let us know.

Thanks for replying Chris - Sorry it's taken me so long to respond myself. I don't think I'm getting email notices about the thread. Anyway - I think the sorting & filtering suggestions are awesome, but I was specifically talking about the check out process.

Paizo.com does not send email notifications for threads.

[RobboNJ69]

graywulfe wrote:

Paizo.com does not send email notifications for threads.

Well that explains a lot! Thanks for the heads up.

[Marc Radle]

I'd like to offer a suggestion that's come up many times before but it really needs to happen.

PLEASE start accepting PayPal. It's really a big negative in my opinion that one cannot pay with PayPal at Paizo's store. I'd order all my gaming books etc if you did, but as it is, I go elsewhere.

I know there are reasons cited for why you don't (processing monthly subscriptions being a biggie if I recall correctly) but there's got to be some sort of comprimise. Why not simply allow PayPal for single purchases only, but not for ongoing subscriptions, for example

[Vic Wertz]

The showstopper is that PayPal has a maximum allowable amount of time between the time the order was made and the time it shipped, and that doesn't work with preorders, subscriptions, and some items that have to be ordered on demand from our suppliers. If we allowed Paypal only for the things that we could fulfill within the allotted timeframe, it would look completely chaotic to anyone not intimately familiar with our warehouse processes. We determined that the messaging we'd need to provide would be way too complex, and we believe it would result in *more* customer unhappiness than just saying "sorry, no PayPal."

[Nikosandros]

Would it be possible to allow the use of PayPal to purchase gift certificates?

If so, customers could gift themselves the certificates and the use them to make their purchases. It would be somewhat convoluted, but it could work.

[FattyLumpkin]

RobboNJ69 wrote:

Anyway - I think the sorting & filtering suggestions are awesome, but I was specifically talking about the check out process.

The cart works great. Its when you go to check out that the problems start.

Its the 4 boxes. "Steps in red must be completed before your order can be processed. Steps in green have already been completed or contain default information, but you may update that information at any time. Steps in gray have not yet been visited."

Step 1 is black, but I've already went past that, shouldn't it be green? Step 2 is in grey - internet-wide, grayed out buttons say "disabled". 3 is in red, but don't I also have to confirm the order (X) and select shipping (2) before the order can be processed; shouldn't they be red too? Or did I miss something and I can't click on those yet?

The X for confirm the order is confusing - "X" usually means delete or cancel. When I do enter my payment information, step 3 is in black, but your instructions say green is complete - did I complete it or was there an issue?

Thanks for listening...

I agree with everything RobboNJ69 said, especially about the many checkout steps and the dreaded X. Oh, that X. My little brain keeps reading it as a bad thing, or at least a "Close" or "Exit" thing. There just seems to be a lot of clunky steps that don't seem necessary in the process.

In my experiences the website is slow. I say this after having been a Paizo customer for years. I've used a number of computers and a few different browsers...although I think it's worse on FireFox. There may be more "Working" and "Spinning" than any other website I visit, including the more graphic heavy sites.

Since I'm complaining...the download page is cumbersome. The personalization process is a lot of clicking and waiting. Rather than being excited about my downloads I find myself putting off going there because it takes so much management.

Okay, enough from me.

[Tinalles]

In the spirit of offering detailed, concrete feedback, I have written up a brief usability analysis of the Paizo checkout procedure. It has screenshots, discussion, and recommendations. Here it is, in PDF format:

Paizo Checkout Feedback

I would usually charge for something like this, but in this case I actually spent money to make it happen. (Two purchases to get the screenshots.) So I hope it's helpful.

[Steve Geddes]

Nice work, Tinalles. :)

[KarlBob]

Tinalles wrote:

In the spirit of offering detailed, concrete feedback, I have written up a brief usability analysis of the Paizo checkout procedure. It has screenshots, discussion, and recommendations. Here it is, in PDF format:

Paizo Checkout Feedback

I would usually charge for something like this, but in this case I actually spent money to make it happen. (Two purchases to get the screenshots.) So I hope it's helpful.

I don't even work for Paizo, but after reading the linked document, I feel compelled to thank you for providing such an excellent analysis of the order process. If I needed a site redesigned, an example like that would make choosing a designer much easier.

[Tinalles]

Gee, thanks! Glad you liked it. ^_^

[KarlBob]

Tinalles wrote:

Gee, thanks! Glad you liked it. ^_^

You're welcome.

[Nikosandros]

Tinalles wrote:

In the spirit of offering detailed, concrete feedback, I have written up a brief usability analysis of the Paizo checkout procedure. It has screenshots, discussion, and recommendations. Here it is, in PDF format:

Paizo Checkout Feedback

I would usually charge for something like this, but in this case I actually spent money to make it happen. (Two purchases to get the screenshots.) So I hope it's helpful.

All great recommendations. Thanks for taking the time to write this.