Highend – ecommerce issues

I have been using Highend for a busy ecommerce store, and have found the following serious issues from listening to feedback from my customers:

#1- Customers (especially non-technical ones) are finding it hard to figure out how to checkout; because when you add a product to your cart, there is not any obvious “Go to Checkout” modal window that pops up making it easy to find your way there, like many large ecommerce site have. Customers are adding a product, and then thinking “now what? How do I check out??”. This is a serious issue for my customers and has been reported several times in the last two weeks since we launched the new site. Some more tech-savvy customers find the “view cart” or “checkout” button at the top under their dynamic cart icon, but many do not.

I suggest an option in the Highend options like: “Open modal ‘Go to Checkout’ window when customer adds product to cart? Yes? No?” (radio button) that would make it easy for customers to get to the checkout screen.

#2- Also, the checkout page itself has the shipping options at the top, and the credit card entry stuff way down the page at the bottom. Most customers are used to having each page section (e.g. “shipping”->”enter payment”->”submit order”) of the entire checkout process appear “above the fold”, in other words without using much, if any, vertical scrolling.

So I suggest a multi-step checkout process option in the Highend options, for if store owners would like the checkout to lead the customer through the steps more easily, and without all the info on one page. Of course, care would need to be taken to ensure that shipping options update properly, if they are not yet visible on the page, and any “address verification” plugins also can get hooks to update address fields even if they aren’t visible. I suggest working with the WooThemes developers to make sure this works correctly.

#3- Also, on the main product shop or category pages, when you move your mouse over (or tap on a mobile device) on the photo of a product, nothing happens. You have to actually click the “Add to cart” or “view details”, or “select options” (if the product has variations) button on top of the product photo in order to get to it. This is a pretty serious usability issue and makes it hard for customers to purchase products when they expect to be able to just click the product image itself.

So I suggest adding an anchor tag around the entire image itself, to make the photo itself a link, in addition to the buttons, so that at the very least, when they click the image instead of the buttons on the image, they will still be sent to the product details page for that product.

Since rebuilding my site with Highend, even though it looks a lot nicer, I have seen sales drop about 45% due to these issues (again getting direct feedback from customers on what they are struggling with). Not good. I would really appreciate it if you would consider adding these three above-described options to the checkout process.

Thanks.