Multiship (multiple ship-to addresses) + One-Page Checkout
November 17, 2007 - Culture
Cookies for all your friends, in a single, one-page checkout
While “multiship” (multiple ship-to addresses) is certainly nothing new, it is fairly uncommon in free or reasonably priced ecommerce systems. Similarly, a one-page checkout isn’t super common either.
So when Ellie & Ollie needed multiship on their checkout, we set out to squeeze what could have been a disastrous amount of functionality into our one-page checkout. Luckily, the end result is really quite beautiful:
Ellie & Ollie, homepage
NOTE: This is a live store, so don’t buy anything unless you want the cookies, which are actually quite delicious.
Multiship => More Sales
Multiship isn’t just neat. It also boosts sales. While we have no actual research to back that up, we’re pretty confident about it. If your customers see a nice “Ship to” or “Send this gift to” input field before they add their product to cart, not only will they realize that it’s a possibility, but they’ll also start thinking about all the people they need to buy gifts for.
While certainly not for everybody, multiship should be a boon to any stores that sell products purchased as gifts. With the holidays coming up, multiship might be just what your clients need to boost their sales.
Multiship + One-Page Checkout
There were a few things to consider when we went about adding multiship, as we didn’t want to complicate the checkout process at all. The biggest challenge was figuring out how to manage ship-to names prior to checkout, since authentication doesn’t happen until checkout. The solution was to use “nicknames” for the ship-to names when adding to the cart, and then add the addresses on checkout. It’s a quite natural flow that’s been “mom tested”. (Seriously, I test things out by showing them to my mom. If she can get through a checkout without giving up, it’s good in my book.)
Amazingly simple. FoxyCart now allows our customers to ship to multiple addresses from a single, and very simple, shopping cart page.
It’s just as tasty as our cookies.
– Mary Beth Schad, Ellie & Ollie, Cookies for Dinner
The End Result
Aaron at The Brand Hatchery did absolutely amazing work designing the site, and Ryan at CollabPad did a superb implementation. We’re really, really happy with how it turned out.
