Different billing/shipping address - can it be made easier?

I'm working on a site which sells various products to college students - many of which are bought by parents to be shipped to students. Is there a way for parent to shop (as a guest), fill the cart (we hope!) and then, in the account setup form during checkout process, input both billing AND shipping address at the same time? Maybe something like "check here if DIFFERENT shipping address" to bring up new form, or just have similar fields on same form.

The way it works now (not saying I set it up right, but...) is that it calculates Sales Tax based on Billing address (the only address it has at the moment!), says it will ship to Billing address ... unless shopper wants to change address, in which case it forces her to click thru 2 screens (if I remember correctly) to input new address, then comes back to confirm checkout with tax now based on Shipping address. Confusing, complicated, too much effort - and this is not the place we want to slow our shoppers down! And if this shopper comes back another day to buy her student something else, does she go thru this process all over again?

Any help, guidance and ideas would REALLY be appreciated here. Thanks!

The process is as you described:

• add to cart
• start checkout
• login or create an account by supplying billing address
• if want different shipping address, click the button to change the address and fill in the fields. Returning to shipping-choices page allows selection of a shipping method
• choose payment method
• confirm final order details.

And if this shopper comes back another day to buy her student something else, does she go thru this process all over again?No -- addresses are stored in her address book. These entries can be edited in her My Account area.

I suppose you could draw attention to the address book before doing checkout and encourage them to supply the addresses earlier.

Also, you can change the maximum number of addresses allowed in your Admin->Maximum Values area.

If you want to change the flow of the checkout process or merge the various pages into one, feel free. That will require significant custom coding to implement.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I thought. I'm now playing with a very different approach to this problem and have a different question:

How can I get the shopper to input some text after filling her cart and proceeding to checkout? I tried (don't laugh) to force this by adding an attribute (text type) to all products - worked great when there was only 1 product, but as soon as I added a couple more, the shopper had to go to each product's individual page to order (instead of from the category page showing all products), which meant she then would have to input (the same thing) to that text attribute for every item ordered. Grrr!

All I want to do is make the shopper input 1 small line of text that relates to the entire order, not each item. Any ideas on this?

Thanks!

The Comments field shows on the Checkout-Shipping and Checkout-Payment pages, and can be edited on either page. This information is reviewable on checkout-confirmation, and is then stored with the order, and accessible to you via the Admin area.

No need to add attributes to track one piece of comment data ... it's already built-in.

True, but how do I make it a "required" field? That's the key!

True, but how do I make it a "required" field? That's the key!modify the includes/modules/pages/..... /header_php.php file for the checkout_confirmation page so that it checks to see whether the comments field contains any information. If it does not, have it halt and display a messageStack alert explaining the problem and redirect back to the checkout_payment page again so they can fill in the field.

For example:
in /includes/modules/pages/checkout_confirmation/header_php.php find this $_SESSION['comments'] = zen_db_prepare_input($_POST['comments']);and add this below it:```
if ($_SESSION['comments'] == '') {
$messageStack->add_session('checkout_payment', ENTRY_COMMENTS_REQUIRED_ERROR, 'error');
}

We are looking into developing a similar solution for one of our customers.

How far along are you with your development?