Table of Contents

Checkout

In ecommerce, the checkout refers to the final phase of the online shopping process where a customer completes their purchase. It mimics the experience of going to a cashier in a physical store; cart review, customer information, shipping, payment, and confirmation.

To implement checkout in a DynamicWeb design you will use:

  • Cart commands to create and manipulate cart objects
  • The Shopping cart app to handle the checkout process

Cart commands

Cart commands are system commands which are used to create and manipulate cart objects, e.g. by adding or removing a specific product to/from cart.

Cart commands can be executed in two ways, for example by submitting an URL with the cartcmd parameter and a set of other relevant parameters...

<a href='/cartcmd=add&ProductID=PROD1'>Add to cart</a>

...or by submitting a form with the parameters:

<form method="post">
    <input type="hidden" name="ProductId" value="@product.Id" />
    <button type="submit" name="CartCmd" value="Add">Add</button>
</form>

Cart commands are typically submitted from product lists or product details pages, or from the cart overview to e.g. remove or increase/decrease the number of products on an order line, but they can be submitted from any context.

Read more in the Cart commands article.

The Shopping Cart app

The actual checkout process is handled by the Shopping Cart app - which is attached to a paragraph on a page and configured in the standard manner.

The shopping cart app has the following jobs:

  1. Keep a record of the cart contents and display them and related information to the customer
  2. Guide the user through the checkout process - where they can e.g. enter an address, select a payment method, etc.
  3. Display a receipt and sends out order confirmation emails

Checkout steps

All of these functions are organized and implemented via the checkout steps - settings on the app which control how the checkout process , e.g.:

  • Display cart contents
  • Select payment and shipping
  • Checkout (system step, required)
  • Show receipt

The steps above the Checkout steps are used to ask the customer to provide information - e.g. a billing address - and to select e.g. a payment method. Each step has a corresponding Razor-template which controls the layout and submits information to the cart app.

You can read more about how you submit various types of information to the shopping cart in the 'Submitting to cart' article.

Payment & Shipping

During checkout flow, the customer will often be given a choice of payment methods and shipping methods to choose from. DynamicWeb 10 features installable providers for integrating with a number of external payment and delivery services - see more here:

Please note that while we do our utmost to document how to use our software, we are not responsible for documenting how external systems work or are configured.

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