Buying Without Registering (Or At Least With Minimum Information)

[kitutal]

With the basic version of ZenCart, whenever a customer wants to buy anything from my shop, they have to fill out a long form with their name, date of birth, address, telephone number, and so on, regardless of what they are buying.
The situation is, my shop offers a mixture of physical items and entirely digital purchases which of course need no shipping address or similar information. I am wondering, then, if there is any way to set the shop to not require account creation and the input of all those details, and instead only request shipping information when a physical product is being ordered? Effectively to allow non-registered customers to purchase items, providing they supply any needed information each time they order.

I have looked over: http://www.zen-cart.com/showthread.p...Support-Thread thread and this seems useful, but whilst it simplifies the registration process, it seems only valid for shops selling only digital goods, which is not the case for me.

I also read up on this question raised, and the suggestions that followed:

People are becoming more and more hesitant to give out personal information, until they are ready to go ahead with a purchase!

Can this work for sites with actual products for shipping?

Can a new customer register, without placing the following information:

First Name: *
Last Name: *
Street Address: *
City: *
Post/Zip Code: *
Country: *
Additional Contact Details Telephone:

and then get forced to place the above at checkout?

but found this did not work, as it still left all the fields set as required, regardless of whether the minimum input values are 0, this is not communicated to anyone feeling daunted by the huge page of information requested from them.



I cannot find anything else similar discussed on this site, but I am hoping someone here can suggest some way around this situation. My eventual aim is to make buying from my site as quick and easy as possible rather than drive potential customers away by requiring they spend ten minutes filling out pages of forms.

Thank you.

[stevesh]

Search the Plugins area for COWOA.

[kitutal]

Have installed this and something called 'Fast and Easy Checkout' I found in another thread, neither seem to have had any effect, even though I uploaded them in the same way as every other mod I've used, did I do something wrong?

[stevesh]

Both may have a SQL statement that needs to be run. Did you do that ? Also, I believe the Fast and Easy Checkout mod requires that you install the included JS Loader before the mod will work.

[mc12345678]

Both may have a SQL statement that needs to be run. Did you do that ? Also, I believe the Fast and Easy Checkout mod requires that you install the included JS Loader before the mod will work.

Correct on the fast and easy checkout. It will change how options are shown in the admin window, so don't be too surprised. :) do suggest making a backup in case there is a desire to remove those changes.