Wednesday 7 September 2016

Checkout faster with JAREEYA

Tired of a long checkout process? No wonder why... First you go to your shopping cart, then you move on to the next page where you enter your personal details, after that you land on the payment page, followed by the order confirmation page before you are transferred to the payment provider's own site (if no on-site payment solution exists)... And finally, you may end up on the "Thank you" or "Order confirmation" page which confirms your order was received.

Let's make an analogy to a supermarket: You wander through the aisles, take the products you need from the shelf and place them in your trolley. When you are done, you are heading towards the checkout lane where an emotionless checkout assistant takes your billing and shipping address (your goods do get delivered though, unless you want to pick them up later). You are then sent to the next desk where you inspect the contents of your trolley and confirm that it is all you need and you are ready to pay. Still happy with your shopping? Good. Please proceed to the cashier – who may not even work in the same shop but is placed at the other side of town, and it takes time getting there. Once your payment has been taken, you then go to the supermarket's exit to pick up your receipt. If you were sent to the external cashier half across town, you have to return to the supermarket first! After getting hold of your receipt you are allowed to leave the shop, but not without a subtle invitation to "Continue Shopping".

Screenshot of Cart and Checkout Page
Obviously, the online world differs from the physical in many respects and the above supermarket comparison is not quite fair. But you see there are a lot of steps involved, all that are normally done at checkout. The analogy above of being sent around various counters or even an external payment site is the going from one page to the next in cyberspace. All these transfers adding time. Not useful time, but waiting time. In the case you are being transferred to a 3rd party payment provider (for example PayPal), it normally adds even more lag as a connection to a different server has to be established first.

Each step means a new page needs to be loaded and even on a rather fast website, it all adds up. So we streamlined our checkout process and got rid of all checkout pages. View your cart, enter your payment and shipment details and pay – all on the same site, quick and easy. The obvious advantage is a faster checkout process. Naturally, no advantage without a drawback but it is only a small one: The shopping cart page is marginally slower with loading but it is hardly noticeable and only a disadvantage to you if you add items to your cart and then don't checkout.

Without going into too much technical detail, what happens when you load a page is that your computer is establishing a connection with the server that hosts the website. Data like text, images and scripts are loaded by your computer after the connection has been established. Going to the next page on the same site, both computers (i.e. your device and the server) have to start talking to each other again. Waiting for the server to respond is a relatively time consuming step – transferring data is pretty fast in these days. In fact, on a well configured website, images and scripts are  temporarily stored on your computer and they don't need to be downloaded every time they are needed, which improves a site's speed.

To summarise the above: Our checkout process is faster because all necessary things for both the shopping cart as well as checkout are loaded at once rather than at several steps like in a traditional checkout process. The disadvantage is that the shopping cart page is slightly slower than it could be, but the difference is negligible and more than offsets by the benefist of our all-in-one solution.


We wish you a wonderful time browsing our site and hope you enjoy our site and its fast checkout process :-)

Your JAREEYA-Team

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