Checking out without any shipping or payment modules? Or....

The situation:

Our store is set up in a way that customers don't really need to make a payment or calculate shipping when they check out. (They simply make the order and check out, then our sales reps email them and confirm, then we check stock and calculate shipping, and then the payment is made outside of ZC. Not an ideal process, I know... but unfortunately it's not up to me)

So, the way that this was set up until now, I simply cloned the "flat rate" module (for shipping) with a value of $0, and the "C.O.D." module (for payment).... and changed the text so that the customer understands that shipping will be calculated later, and payment made after that. All good so far.

The problem:

The only problem is... speed. The customer still has to go through the 3-step checkout process, and with very large orders, this gets EXTREMELY slow on our server.
Even after increasing the maximum execution time for processes, I've had one customer who tried to check out, and encountered a timeout error after waiting for 5 minutes, before even getting to Step 1 (5 minutes is the hard limit imposed by our host).

What I need help with:

I'd like to find a way to do either of the below:

1. Completely skip steps 1 and 2 during the checkout process, so that the customer gets straight to the final confirmation page, without having to go through the (extremely slow) shipping and payment pages,

OR
2. If #1 is too complicated to set up: Is there a way to change the shipping and payment modules to essentially do nothing? Seems that they are what's slowing down steps 1 and 2 of the checkout... and as I mentioned above, I don't need shipping and payment, so if I can get rid of the extra calculations and queries that slow everything down, that would help.

Many thanks in advance....

Well, you can easily skip the shipping step by setting all of your products to virtual. Just be careful that ALL of your products are set to virtual because 1 tangible product in the cart will send your customer to step one/shipping.

Sorry that I cannot help you w/ step 2/payment.

Audra

I think you're trying to fix a puncture wound when the broken leg is really the thing you should be focusing on.

You have several other threads detailing rather serious issues which point to server-side problems, and now you're complaining about checkout pages timing out ... and somehow you think skipping parts of checkout will fix a timeout problem. It won't.

Without knowing more about what's in your cart or how your products are configured, I think your real problem is a poorly-tuned and poorly-configured webserver.

Thanks for the replies Audra and DrByte,

About the server issues and speed problems - I've gotten rid of most of these now (with the Query Cache add-on, and going through the admin section and turning off multiple features I didn't need), and some pages show almost a tenfold speed improvement. The threads I posted were my try at going through each of the problematic sections/pages and optimizing its behavior :smile:

However, regarding the specific issue of checking out - logically, the shipping modules did have something to do with it; before my optimizations, one test I made (100 items with attributes in the cart, 3 shipping modules cloned from 'flatrate') took 180 seconds to get to step 1 of the checkout... with a ridiculous query count of 93,832. This was by far the biggest I've ever seen on any part of the site, and uninstalling modules reduced it drastically.

So, with such a colossally epic number of queries (which should never happen period), it is only rational to assume that skipping this step would indeed help fix the problem. I know our webserver isn't the best out there, but this kind of load is something that must be reduced no matter what server we're on.

It's a known issue that v1.x has some problems with query counts when there are large numbers of attributed products in the shopping cart.
This and other query inefficiencies has been one of several primary focus points in the v2.0 release coming very soon.

You are correct to disable any features you're not actually using. If there are certain features related to attributes which you're not using, you can turn those off too, in Admin->Configuration->Attribute Settings.