How to skip address fields in regular checkout, as it does in cart?

Hi @alx359,

What feature of Smart Buttons do you like that would make you want to use it over having it disabled and showing the default checkout button styles?

Hi John, not sure what you mean? I do not really care of smart buttons per se, in the checkout page at least. I care of the added simplicity PPE checkout brings to customers. In the cart page, smart buttons look nice, and the vertical layout gives good enough focus to the fact PP can also be used as a pure CC gateway, when a PP account is neither available nor desirable. Most importantly though, the user can skip filling the billing/shipping boxes at WC.

If you’re implying the ordinary PP buttons, in the checkout page, would make it possible to skip entering billing/shipping info altogether at WC (after perhaps making all checkout fields optional first, via woocommerce_default_address_fields), that’s unknown to me. Please confirm, as I would have to refactor my code once again to hide the checkout fields when PP is chosen. I really like the feature of getting the customer to fill less redundant clutter as possible and get to pay ASAP.

Thank you.

Another nice feature depending of smart-buttons I just became aware of: opening PP in a lightboxed window. Wish to keep that in checkout too, but the address still taken from PP, NOT from the checkout fields as is now. Why the need of the latter anyway? It seems counter-intuitive disabling such a great feature.

Hi @alx359

I think I see what you mean. It would be nice if the billing information populated the PayPal fields when using Smart Payment Buttons, as it does when Smart Payment Buttons feature is disabled. I made an enhancement request, assuming that PayPal’s API will allow it, that you can follow here:

https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce-gateway-paypal-express-checkout/issues/474

Hi John, thanks very much for your attention regarding this important feature. I think what you suggest is nice too, but the issue at hand I’m reporting is the other way around, namely:

Guest checkout IS NOT pulling the address information from PP, but insists of requiring the checkout fields.

So the description at github, for this issue, should read:

Instead of:

When Smart Payment Buttons are enabled the data is not pulled from the checkout fields

should be:

When Smart Payment Buttons are enabled, in checkout the data is now pulled from the checkout fields, but should be pulled from PP instead

Actually, both features in unison would be needed for the most flexible and smoother customer experience of the PP checkout. Please confirm if we’re on the same page.

Hi @alx359

I see. From the Cart and Product pages, PayPal Checkout uses the PayPal account’s billing information attached to their account. If the user makes it to the Checkout page then those fields are user over the default billing within PayPal. This applies to both the default PayPal Checkout and when using the Smart Payment Buttons feature.

That said, if a user fills out the checkout page and is not logged into PayPal, those fields then carry over to the PayPal payment process. In turn, this prevents that user’s information from being overwritten if that user then chooses to log in to PayPal. So as you see, either option could be an inconvenience to the other.

I’ll take note of your suggestion and will keep an eye out for similar requests, in the event the current process becomes troublesome to other users.

Thanks again,

John, thanks for the polite refusal, but please take the dev hat out for a moment and kindly think from a bit of distance from the customer’s perspective. Filling checkout fields before money has changed hands is yet another step in the checkout chain that may add up to the heap of unfinished transactions. The whole point of PPE and the like is to shorten up such uncritical steps. What I’m saying is, please put an option to the PPE plugin to read the PP fields from checkout context (you already did this from cart). So implementers like me could hide/disable the WC checkout fields altogether to enforce the behavior we want the user to have. At the moment, the WC team has decided to take that away from us by hard-coding the chosen scenario of feeding fields from WC instead of PP.

Hope it makes sense at some point. Thank you.

Hi @alx359

Thanks for your input and idea! At this point let’s start by adding your idea to the ideas board where others can vote on the idea of which billing address should be the default. Here is a link to do that:

https://ideas.woocommerce.com/forums/133476-woocommerce?category_id=337582

Thanks again for working with me on this and we hope to see changes like this in the future.

Hi John, thanks, but no thanks. You’ve been very polite, but no need to shape the topic into a different, ultimately unfruitful direction. I’ve never suggested “which billing address should be the default”; all the time my point was about CHOICE. Fresh code but with still immutable “defaults” is just an unnecessarily limiting approach.

Anyway, I’ve already chosen a different PP solution that implements a more sensible approach of making the purchasing experience as easier as possible to customers, despite of certain technical limitations.

Thank you.