[system0]

I am still in the process of getting my cs cart powered shop ready. Well, to be more precise Ive got most things the way I want it but Im waiting for the bank to send out my company bank account details

Anyways, me and my partner have been deciding on what payment methods to use. We are thinking of using google checkout and paypal...and we might add 2checkout too Im not sure if it would be worthwhile since its a 3rd party service like google checkout . Then again, more payment options for the customer is always good which is why we are offering paypal even though it sucks (so many people have it and have money in their accounts because of ebay etc we would be silly not to at least try it out)

Here are the problems which occur with adding google checkout.

The customer misses the google checkout link with the checkout button

* If google checkout is your sole payment method then the customer is taken to a page with the google checkout link if he clicks on 'View Cart' and if he clicks on 'Checkout'
* When you add any secondary method eg. paypal, check, phone ordering or whatever, then a problem occurs. The customer will see the link to pay via google checkout if he or she clicks on the view cart page but NOT if they click on the checkout link.

By clicking on the checkout link they are completely bypassing the option to use google checkout. I assume this would happen a lot as it's more likely that those who are ordering just one or two products will jump straight to the checkout and not review their order.

I believe that this is something which needs to be looked at in future versions of CS Cart. Has anyone else had a problem with this? Did you find a workaround?

The problem with Google Checkout and user accounts

This is a problem which im sure most google checkout users here have however Im not sure what the CS cart development team can do about.

If a customer pays using paypal or check or whatever then they create an account and they enter all their personal details. This can be very beneficial for you as it means that customers can see previous orders with you and it means they can see points they have accumulated too.

If they choose to pay with google checkout though they completely miss out the create account stage therefore no account is created. I believe this could cause many problems in the future. Consider a customer who buys from you a lot however half the time they pay via paypal and half the time they pay via google checkout (something which could be very likely as some people only pay via paypal when they have money in their account). In this scenario, the customer would only see half of his orders in his account profile. Clearly that isnt what we want.

Im sure that the CS cart could make it so that the google checkout paying customers have to create an account ie. they place the google checkout link after they have created an account. However, do we want this. This would no doubt annoy the hell out of your customers, particuarly those who are not return buyers.
Why you ask? Well, you ask them to input all of their personal details (address etc) and 5 mins later they need to give all those details again to google.

Do you use Google Checkout

It seems that using google checkout can cause some small problems but I would still like to use it as the fees are very low and most people trust google too.

I'd love to hear from other google checkout users. How have you integrated Google checkout with your shop?

[dgeere]

Check our site for how we make sure the button is seen.

We ONLY use Google Checkout.

Please DONT exactly copy us

We contacted cs-cart about getting the data pushed back from Google to create a user account and generate a password, then email the customer their log in details... they said it can be done, but that it will cost.

This should really be a default feature of the cart, as such I refuse to pay for it. Maybe a group effort to get it sorted?

Either way, hope that helps.

[gpro]

Check our site for how we make sure the button is seen.

We ONLY use Google Checkout.

Please DONT exactly copy us

We contacted cs-cart about getting the data pushed back from Google to create a user account and generate a password, then email the customer their log in details... they said it can be done, but that it will cost.

This should really be a default feature of the cart, as such I refuse to pay for it. Maybe a group effort to get it sorted?

Either way, hope that helps.

I will pitch in for that mod dgeere.

hopefully we can have sno arrange this mod to be made.

[system0]

dgeere - yeah i checked out your site a few weeks ago (via the thread you posted a while back asking people to check it out). You've done a fantastic job skinning it.

I like what we've done with the payment section with google checkout. I was going to edit the template to place more info there but it will be a little different. As I said, we are going to offer paypal as well so we are going to have a few sentences recommending google checkout but also have a paypal link.

It's very encouraging to know that at least an account could be generated in the future. It's little things like this that are stopping cs cart from being the best shopping script on the web

Just out of interest, do you find that no user accounts being created via sales is a major problem?

[dgeere]

Nope, users auto get a google account when they pay, that contains all the shipping status info etc.

We just removed all the links to login and account management etc on the site for now until we start using user accounts.

we would like to be able to use the newsletter features etc but at the moment we can always export any data we need to another bit of software so no huge loss.

[system0]

thats something I may consider doing once I get google checkout up and running. We opened our company bank account last week but the information and credit card details have not arrived yet so we cannot open our account with google yet.

So Im unable to see how the google checkout system works.

Obviously you can see a users address when they place an order but can you also see their previous orders with you?

[John]

Your shipping costs are not going over to Google, just the price of the item. I see you have free shipping if you buy 3 or more, but try to buy one or two and the shipping is still free. Same problem Im having.

[system0]

Your shipping costs are not going over to Google, just the price of the item. I see you have free shipping if you buy 3 or more, but try to buy one or two and the shipping is still free. Same problem Im having.

were you referring to dgeere's site?

We are actually offering free shipping on all items however we are going to offer special delivery in the future so this would be an issue.

[John]

Yea, I was referring to dgeere's site - yumbadges.com. I put items in the cart and gave my Florida zipcode it said 2.99 shipping, then I went over to Google and no shipping.... only the item. Oh well... this will get figured out sooner or later..

[dgeere]

Yeah it happens sometimes and not others. We are not totally worried about it as our shipping costs are low but I will ask support to have another look. Thanks for saying though

[dgeere]

Yea, I was referring to dgeere's site - yumbadges.com. I put items in the cart and gave my Florida zipcode it said 2.99 shipping, then I went over to Google and no shipping.... only the item. Oh well... this will get figured out sooner or later..

Ah, BUT it wont add / calculate the shipping UNTIL you are logged in and on the next step of the checkout. So maybe its just that

Anywho, for those that want to test checkout just use the sandbox mode

[retrogamer]

The customer misses the google checkout link with the checkout button

* If google checkout is your sole payment method then the customer is taken to a page with the google checkout link if he clicks on 'View Cart' and if he clicks on 'Checkout'
* When you add any secondary method eg. paypal, check, phone ordering or whatever, then a problem occurs. The customer will see the link to pay via google checkout if he or she clicks on the view cart page but NOT if they click on the checkout link.

By clicking on the checkout link they are completely bypassing the option to use google checkout. I assume this would happen a lot as it's more likely that those who are ordering just one or two products will jump straight to the checkout and not review their order.

I believe that this is something which needs to be looked at in future versions of CS Cart. Has anyone else had a problem with this? Did you find a workaround?

I know this thread was started a while back but it's still a relevant issue for a lot of stores.

In case it helps anyone else, I approached this problem by removing (commenting out) the link to the checkout in sideboxes/cart.tpl
Then in the admin panel/ languages page, I renamed the 'view_cart' value to 'View basket/checkout'

The benefit of doing this is that it forces the buyer to go via the view basket option to pay, therefore always seeing the google checkout button. Note that it is no longer called the basket as far as the customer's concerned. To save confusion, it is now called 'View basket/checkout'.

This solution is very similar to dgeere's suggestion for which he should take credit. However, I would like to add that at this point on the basket page, you can inform your customers that they have a choice; checkout as normal with paypal and keep the account data aspect. Or they can bypass the account registration process and go via Google checkout.
I think this method gives you the most control over the checkout process, and as I would guess the majority of customers would opt for Paypal over Google checkout, you retain all the benefits of customer registrations for most of your customers.

This is the route I've gone down. As soon as my store is launched, I'll post up a link so you can see it implemented.
Hope this all makes sense?
My first post and I've gained a lot from the forum so nice to contribute something back

[jeffshead]

I know I'm just starting out, but so far, I don't care much for Google Checkout. I know there is no monthly fee, but…

1. I don't like the fact that it is not listed as an option on the checkout page.
2. It takes, on average, 12 minutes for the transaction to be fully processed. That means my customers will not have immediate access to the downloads they have purchased when they click on the "Return to Merchant" button.
3. In addition to updating order statuses in CS-Cart, you have to login to your Google Checkout account and manually update order statuses there as well.

I think I will remove GC as a checkout option.

For those of you that are currently using GC, no offense intended. I just wanted to add my own "two cents" for others that are considering using GC.

Please let me know if any of my information is incorrect.

[BOB'5]

Dgeere: That site is very good. Am just setting mine up now.

What shipping settings you using (I'm from UK too) as I can't get the shipping to work for me and all the shipping companies are US. My shipping is going to be more or less flat rate anyhow.

Looking forward to your reply

Bob

[clips]

I was wondering if some of you just started have "free shipping" because you could not get Google Checkout to charge shipping on a consistant basis. We have tried to turn on the Google Checkout several times at newtsgames.com but have problems with it being able to pull the freight charges back from my site.

We went into the tools section as CS recommended and found the following type of error messages being given...

Integration Console 1 - 15 of 15 issues
Date Type Order Description
Jul 21, 2008 11:24:27 AM EDT Error - We timed out waiting for your server at .../google_calculations.php -- the error we got is: Read timed out Your server must respond faster to merchant calculation callback requests.

When I first launched this site I was told that I needed to be on at least a VPS. Not to mention we learned that CS works very bad on a Windows server. So we moved to a Linux, VPS and the site does go faster, but we still get this "waiting for your server" message with Google Checkout.

Honestly, it is really starting to sound like it is not a server issue and it is a slow response issue with the CS-Cart programming side.

Has anyone figured out how to resolve the "timing out" problem that Google Checkout has?

[clips]

So we have figured out that Google has a crazy "3 second" rule. Basically when someone tries to checkout, Google talks to your site via XML which tries to get the shipping information. If you have generic charges set up this works fine, but if you use UPS, USPS or whatever to figure out actual shipping charges you can pretty much guarentee that Google will show "$0" for your freight!

I am guessing that the above problem is why so many have opted to just have "free" shipping. Since Google Checkout was all they had to use to accept payments they were pretty much stuck with it.

As for us, we have had to opt out of accepting Google Checkout. While we would love to be able to accept it, Google appears to have a long, long way to go before they are really a good, viable option.

The reason I make the above "blanket" statement is because CS is not the only shopping cart that has this issue.

The bottom line is I believe there is more than one reason that Google has such a low, low part of this checkout business. I would have to admit that this is probably one HUGE reason that many merchants are unable to use Google Checkout. I'm sure there are more, but the fact that they make this "time-out" so fast is a joke to say the least.

[BOB'5]

I know this thread was started a while back but it's still a relevant issue for a lot of stores.

In case it helps anyone else, I approached this problem by removing (commenting out) the link to the checkout in sideboxes/cart.tpl
Then in the admin panel/ languages page, I renamed the 'view_cart' value to 'View basket/checkout'

The benefit of doing this is that it forces the buyer to go via the view basket option to pay, therefore always seeing the google checkout button. Note that it is no longer called the basket as far as the customer's concerned. To save confusion, it is now called 'View basket/checkout'.

This solution is very similar to dgeere's suggestion for which he should take credit. However, I would like to add that at this point on the basket page, you can inform your customers that they have a choice; checkout as normal with paypal and keep the account data aspect. Or they can bypass the account registration process and go via Google checkout.
I think this method gives you the most control over the checkout process, and as I would guess the majority of customers would opt for Paypal over Google checkout, you retain all the benefits of customer registrations for most of your customers.

This is the route I've gone down. As soon as my store is launched, I'll post up a link so you can see it implemented.
Hope this all makes sense?
My first post and I've gained a lot from the forum so nice to contribute something back

Just done this as a quick fix myself.

How did you get rid of the "checkout" button near the bottom though? Can't seem to find the right file.

Cheers,

Bob

[BOB'5]

Found it under buttons and deleted it.

[BOB'5]

Ok, am at the stage where I want to give PP a try (already linked and working).

Just want to see if it affects sales.

Only problem is that I deleted the "checkout" button and have forgotten where from:

{* $Id: checkout.tpl 385 2005-07-03 20:54:02Z lantan $ *} {include file="buttons/button.tpl" but_text=$lang.checkout but_onclick=$but_onclick but_href=$but_href but_target=$but_target action_but="action_" but_style=$but_style}