Checkout & addresses
| Screen | Route | Minimum role |
|---|---|---|
| Checkout | /checkout | Public |
| Customer address book | /account/addresses | Customer |
| Shop settings | /admin/settings/shop | Editor |
| Checkout field settings | /admin/settings/checkout | Editor |
Choosing the checkout fields
Settings → Checkout decides what checkout asks for. Each field is set to one of three positions:
| Position | On the form | When the order is placed |
|---|---|---|
| Required | Shown, and the browser will not submit it blank | Refused if blank |
| Optional | Shown | Accepted blank |
| Hidden | Left off | Anything sent for it is thrown away |
| Field | Default |
|---|---|
| Phone | Optional |
| Street address | Required |
| Apartment, suite, unit | Optional |
| City | Required |
| State / region | Optional |
| Postcode / ZIP | Optional |
| Country | Required |
| Order notes | Optional |
Email address and Full name are always required. An order with no email cannot be confirmed or looked up, and every payment provider needs a name.
The choice is enforced by the server, not just the form. A crafted request cannot skip a required field or slip a hidden one onto an order. The same rules apply to the website checkout, the builder's Checkout widget and the mobile API.
A few things follow from it:
- Country stays required while you sell to chosen countries. The shop has to know where an order is going to refuse the places it doesn't serve (see Where you sell).
- Hiding every address field removes the address entirely. The section is renamed Your details, and Ship to a different address disappears. This suits a shop that only sells downloads.
- A different delivery address follows the same rules. If a postcode is required, it is required for the delivery address too, but only once the customer ticks Ship to a different address.
- The address book needs a whole address. If you hide or make optional the street, city or country, an order that leaves one of them out is still placed, but that address is not saved to the customer's account.
Third-party themes
The bundled themes and the builder's Checkout widget follow these settings. A theme that draws its own checkout has to support them too; see Checkout fields. Before making a field Required, check that your theme shows it. A required field the form never draws means nobody can place an order.
Where you sell
Settings → Shop → Sell to decides which countries checkout will accept an order from. It has two positions:
| Setting | What happens |
|---|---|
| The whole world (default) | Every country is offered at checkout |
| Only the countries I choose | Reveals Countries you sell to — a searchable list of checkboxes |
The country list is a dropdown with a search box: type uni to narrow it to the United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and United States, tick the ones you want, and the button shows what you picked. Select these ticks everything the current search is showing, so you can add a region in one go.
An empty list still sells worldwide
Turning Sell to to the chosen-countries option before you have ticked anything would otherwise stop the shop taking a single order. Until at least one country is ticked, the shop keeps selling everywhere.
Once countries are chosen, three things follow:
- the Country dropdown at checkout only lists them;
- an order billed or delivered anywhere else is refused server-side, so a crafted form cannot get around the dropdown;
- the same list is used for the address book in the customer's account.
Countries are stored on the order as their two-letter ISO code (IN, GB, US) rather than as free text, so "USA", "U.S.A." and "United States" can no longer end up as three different places in your order list. Screens that show an address spell the name out. Orders taken before this existed keep whatever text was typed at the time and still read correctly.
Addresses a customer only types once
Settings → Shop → Remember customer addresses (on by default) means nobody has to type their own address at every checkout.
What the customer sees
- First order. They fill the address in as usual. It is saved once the order exists — a checkout that failed on the way through never leaves anything behind.
- Every order after that. Checkout opens with the address already filled in.
- More than one saved address. A Use a saved address picker appears above the billing fields. Choosing one reloads checkout with those details in place. It is an ordinary form, not script, so it works in any browser.
- A one-off delivery. Typing a different address does not quietly add it to their account. A Save this address to my account tickbox does that, and the saved address then becomes their default.
Guests get the same convenience, kept in their browser session rather than an account, so coming back the same day still finds the form filled in.
The address book
Signed-in customers get an Addresses page in their account, alongside Orders and Profile. From there they can add an address, edit one, remove one, and choose which is used by default at checkout. One address is always the default; removing it promotes whichever is left.
An order keeps its own copy
The address written on an order is a snapshot taken at the time. A customer editing or deleting an address book entry afterwards never rewrites the history of an order that has already shipped.
Switching Remember customer addresses off returns checkout to a blank form every time and hides the account page. Addresses already saved are left alone, so turning it back on restores them.