Checkout

The Checkout settings page is six cards in a single column, in the order a shopper meets them. This is the map of it: what each card decides, and which article takes that card further. Two of the six deserve attention before the rest, because marketing opt-in governs what you may do with a customer afterwards and customer information governs whether you finish with an address you can ship to.

Customer information is five dropdowns, one per field. Each decides whether checkout asks a shopper for that detail and whether they can move past it without giving it. The fields become the address on the order, so anything you choose not to ask for is a gap nobody can fill at fulfillment. Against that, every field you require is one more thing between a shopper and paying you, and the five are weighed up here one at a time.

Customer contact method is the first section on the Checkout settings page, and it holds three decisions rather than one. A shopper identifies themselves with either a phone number or an email. They are then offered a way to track the order, or not, and made to sign in, or not. Whatever you settle on becomes the only handle you have on that buyer afterwards, which is the part worth thinking about.

The email opt-in is the sign-up that lets a shopper join your list while they are buying, and there is exactly one thing to decide about it: where it appears. Four placements are available, each putting the sign-up at a different moment in the flow. A shopper who accepts becomes an email subscriber, which is the only list you are permitted to market to, so the placement deserves more thought than it first looks worth.

Everything in the Address collection dialog concerns two addresses and how they relate, the one an order ships to and the one the card is billed to. Three settings sit inside it. They decide whether a shopper may keep the two apart, whether checkout tests that the shipping address can be delivered to at all, and whether the billing address is filled in for them. The dialog also saves in a way its own buttons do not suggest, which is worth knowing before you change anything.

Marketing consent is not something you set for a customer. It is something a shopper grants, channel by channel, so agreeing to email is not agreeing to texts. What counts as consent and what does not, where each permission lands on the customer record, and what happens when someone changes their mind are all taken here.

An abandoned checkout is a cart a shopper filled and left before paying, and Tanqory can email them a link straight back to it. There are two ways to send that email: one at a time from the abandoned checkouts screens, or automatically to everyone through a workflow you build once. Which suits you depends on how many you get, and both are set out here along with the transactional switch that decides who you are allowed to send to.

Every other article in this category sets one thing. This one is what holds true across all of them: saving publishes straight to your live checkout, the two dialogs do not save themselves, and a required field will block an order outright. Some controls cannot be changed at all, and the page settles what the form asks rather than any condition on an individual order.

The Add-to-cart limit caps how many of one product a single shopper can put in their cart. It quietly does a second job as well, since a cap also stops anyone using the cart to work out how much stock you are holding. Picking the number is the whole task: too low and you turn away a genuine bulk buyer, too high and it stops nothing.

Advanced preferences is the fifth card on the Checkout settings page and behaves unlike the four above it. Those are settings laid out in front of you; this one is two rows, each opening a dialog of its own. Between them these pages explain what the two rows govern, why they sit behind dialogs, and how a change in one actually reaches your live checkout.

Switched off, no tip option appears anywhere in checkout. Switched on, a tip step appears offering three percentages that you choose, and a shopper can add to the total as they pay. Setting those percentages, and deciding whether the options show immediately or stay out of the way until someone looks for them, is the whole of it.

Checkout language is the smallest card on the Checkout settings page, a line of text and a button. The button is the reason to read about it at all. Its label says Edit checkout content, and where it actually goes is the Languages settings page, which is not an editor for checkout wording.

Turning on the SMS row adds a text sign-up to checkout, beside the email one, so shoppers can join your SMS list as they buy. Collecting the numbers and being able to text them are separate matters, though, and nothing can be sent until an SMS marketing app is connected. The sign-up gathers subscribers in the meantime, so the order you do these in matters less than remembering that the second half exists.

Tanqory keeps every checkout a shopper started and left, at Orders > Abandoned, with what was in the cart, who left it, and whether anyone has followed up. The page rewards a little reading. The four summary cards each count something different, contact status and recovery status are not the same thing, and a single record will tell you whether a reminder has already gone out.