Checkout: State selection on international orders is terrible

[bshaf]

We directly lose customers and orders regularly because international customers can't get past the clunky state selection box that forces them to enter something, even when when their address has no state. Make the box optional for countries outside the US. Simple.

[dreamingdigital]

Cool. :) Just for curiosity sake, what would some addresses look like from countries without states/provinces/prefecture?

[bshaf]

In the UK for instance.

71 Cherry Court [street]
SOUTHAMPTON [city]
SO53 5PD [postal code]
UK [country]

No state/province, prefecture in UK addresses.
Most countries outside the US are like this.
All the required state box does is confuse people and they abandon checkout.

[dreamingdigital]

It seems like every ReadyTheme has a different coded work around for this and other issues with the state field so would it not be nice to have some real toggles in the Admin and not need all these front side code workarounds and additional messages? :) Thanks for posting bshaf

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Many international focused web sites have County as the FIRST selection. And then dynamically display required fields.

[dreamingdigital]

Bruce - PhosphorMedia totally.
I'm agreeing with bshaf that the UI solutions need some Admin side "SOMETHING" to go along with it so it's more of a UI organize and optimize rather than code/hack ways around limitations set out by the Admin/app.

We're all preaching to the choir right? :)
dream features list this is.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Oh, i understand...

Here's a declarative Request:

Have ReadyThemes ship with "Multiple OCST" templates for US/UK and International focused websites. The current one on Shadows for example, works fine for US centric shopping.

[bshaf]

I use the Shadows theme. Probably the biggest thing that trips people up is that the state field is "Select or type". Customers don't read that. All they see is a dropdown that won't let them proceed, so many of them select a random state, which we then have to catch in the address.

[Matt Zimmermann]

This sounds like it might be related to the HTML validation performed on the page and that setting not updating if your country is no US or Canada. I will look into adding an update to Shadows 2.01.00 to help with this.

[bshaf]

That would be awesome. Thanks Matt.

[x2jones]

We just switched to Shadows and we are having issues with customers typing their state and then accidentally choosing an autofill address that the browser is remembering. In some cases the address they accidentally choose isnt correct (especially problematic if it's an old/invalid address). They don't notice and then finalize an order with the wrong address. Any suggested solutions for this issue?

[Matt Zimmermann]

Shadows v2.01.00, which will be released with Miva 10.01.00, has a couple of improvements to the way the State/Province datalist works as well as its interaction with the selected country and address validation.