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Feature request: workflow for direct purchases

  

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Topic starter

I'd like to use the platform as part of a funnel and allow prospects to sign up to front end products directly. But at the moment, the workflow is too clunky for this to work. There are 2 blockers as I see it:

1. The platform requires that the user creates an account before starting checkout. It's also not very clear that the user might need to create an account as it looks like a login page. Ideally there would be the ability to checkout as guest with minimal input to secure the purchase, with account creation coming afterwards.

2. Same theme as above, the workflow demands that the onboarding form is completed prior to payment. For a bundle, this could be a huge amount of info that the prospect doesn't have time to complete in the moment, leaving to significant abandonment. Again, the forms really need to come after purchase for the conversion to work

4 Answers
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Appreciate the feedback Chris and Thomas - we are definitely going to be making this workflow much easier for your customers this year. Here's the rough plan for what we're doing.

1. We've just released a "Buy it Now" link that can be used with any prospect that you've loaded into the platform. This allows the recipient to make a purchase without having to log in first. You can read more about it here: https://support.vendasta.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500004107441

2. The above link won't work well if you're using it for more than small number of prospects, so this quarter we'll be creating a widget that can be embedded in our email campaign software so you can better send these out at scale.

3. Our designers are working on a new workflow for your public storefront that will allow for purchases prior to any business app sign up/sign in. The intention is to funnel prospects to a purchase with as little friction (and clicks) as possible. This is likely to be out in Q3.

We're also hard at work on some related initiatives that will make all of the above better, like allowing for products to be sold on your storefront without having to be packaged first, allowing the end purchaser to pick the edition/addons themselves as part of the purchase process, and various other public storefront improvements.

I'd be more than happy to schedule some time with either of you this week to personally go over our roadmap and what we're looking to deliver to you this year, we're very open to making adjustments to our plans to better meet your problems.

Ultimately, we want to give you something that will allow you to funnel prospects to purchase as easily and quickly as possible.

Any update on this? I need a quick and easy way for new customers to purchase products. Like the users said above the current checkout process is horrible.

Hi Lonny. I hear your frustration here - our stats show that the "login" page for new customers is the biggest drop off point in the BIY funnel. There is some technical complexities with solving this, as our platform currently requires all product activations to be associated with an already-created account.

Our first steps to start solving this have revolved around the "Buy it Now" link which can get around this restriction and allows users to make a purchase directly without having to log in first. This has been extended to our email marketing campaigns, so you can more easily send these links out to a wider audience.

However, we haven't solved things yet from the public storefront workflow. I'm in the middle of transitioning this work over to a new division, so unfortunately I don't have any timelines for this next step yet. As we get a team working in this area, if you'd like to have early access we can make sure that you get a chance to get access to all new work in this area first if you'd like.

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Dear Levi,

Thank you very much for your detailed and quality reply. This is very much appreciated.

For sure can we have a call at any time to discuss. I would love to contribute in order to get a perfect self selling solution setup.

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Thank you very much Chris for raising this.

I have addressed this very issue several times but only got weird answers which were just trying to deny the issue and circumvent it somehow.

I entirely agree with you that the public store and the ability for potential customers to just buy our products is broke in general. It seems to me that this feature has never been really thought through from a potential customers point of view.

Lets assume we have a campaign to 10.000 businesses, driving them to a landing page, the #1 objective is to create a purchase and if #1 can't be achieved #2 is to get the contact details. #2 can be done with the acquisition widget, whereby this also needs improvement.

But #1 in the current way is not working. It is exactly as you said. The potential customer is forced in the very first step to login. BIG confusion "Have no login, depart". Lost customer in the very first attempt. I was told from support that one also needs an account with Amazon to buy something. True but this works completely different.

I compare it with a hotel booking. A hotel wants direct bookings, we have to make it as easy as possible to achieve this objective. So I search the room I want (product in this case), chose the date/time and rate provided (product edition in our case), get a summary to confirm, now only I enter my company and personal data and credit card. From that an account is being created automatically in the sales center and the purchased products get activated.

This is the correct process to follow in order to gain direct purchase from the website. The current process is unfortunately counterproductive and not working as you correctly mention.

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Is there any update until now. It is now more than a year until we discussed this urgent request to sell online.