Information Before or After Checkout?

How to proceed...

[andmunn]

As a pretence..

I offer a membership based website, and use 2checkout as my payment processor. Now, i would like to know what everyone thinks.

During "checkout" i need to collect some information from users, namely: there preferred username, and password for my site, and a description and URL of there website.

Now, i have two options:

1. I can get this information in the same "area" i receive payment, and in turn, clients only see 1 form.

or.

2. I can simply process there credit card payment first, and then afterwards, collect the information i need using a basic form script.

What is everyone's suggestion? I'm worried using the first that maybe there will be "too much" to fill out at first, and clients will be unlikely to take the time.

The other way, we bill the client first, and then they fill out the information. If they don't at this point, we can also contact them in the future?

Suggestions?

THanks,
Andrew.

[pleeker]

I don't have any studies or research to lean on in saying this, but as a user, I would prefer one form rather than two. So my vote would be for your option No. 1 -- but again, that's just one man's opinion.

[dkubb]

If you have a high enough volume of orders you should think about testing both approaches. You could set things up so that each click-through to the order forms alternates between form A and form B, so you have an even distribution of people to both forms. Make sure you record the number of total and unique hits to the forms, and how many orders you recieve through each form. Using this info you can figure out your drop out rate for each form; the number of people who went to the form and didn't order. If one was higher than the other, it'd be the clear winner.

Obviously this approach only works for sites with high amounts of traffic, so it may not be appropriate for you. In that case you'll have to go with your gut, but I'd still try to do the following:

1. Always ask for the most important information first. If the system is multi-stage, you might want to think about capturing their email address first so that you can follow up with them if they abandon their cart. (use this with caution, it may not be appropriate to contact your clientelle this way, on the other hand I've seen it done with success several times).
   
2. Capturing payment is one of the primary goals of a shopping cart. IMHO its probably best to collect their contact info and collect payment first then ask them to set up their account afterwards.
   
3. Make it simple for the user. I'm not a big fan of most shopping cart systems, they make the user go through too many steps to order something. The cart I designed for the company I work for is stupid simple, and it works. We only asking for basic contact and credit card info, and once in a while put a checkbox to "add this item to your order for a reduced price". We consistently process around 5-6M USD every year through that cart in a super competitive market. I'd say those are pretty good results. :)

When the order is completed I'd send the person to a setup page, with a unique, hard to guess, identifier in the URL. You ask the person to complete this form now or any time within the next 24 hours to create their account. About an hour after ordering you should have an automated program send them an email if they haven't created an account in that time. Put the setup page's URL with the same unique identifier so that they can go back and create their account at a later time. Email is not completely secure, so it is possible for someone to intercept the email and create their own account, but this should work for most member sites.

To make it even easier you can just ask them for their username at this stage and provide them a default password they can change at a later time. That way there's only one piece of information they need to provide before obtaining access to your member site. You can always capture their URL and website description at a later time; unless of course its critical in some way to your operation. Any "nice to haves" should be deferred to later.

[wackal]

I think you should get all the membership info after they make a payment. You want to make the payment process as easy and short as possible. That way, you can reduce the number of people who don't buy because there is too much to fill out. Once they have paid, then you can get them to do all the rest.