Sean Murphy

Thanks Chris!

That does sound like a great approach; I'll give it a try. I was indeed aware of the session limits, and actually I'm doing the same thing for the shopping cart right now – storing just a Cart ID (with the same consequences of abandoned records, etc).

I saw one of the UserVoice votes for upcoming videos was about wizard forms. I suppose this is kind of a similar goal in some ways.

There are lots of other ways to handle this and this is just one approach. I'm curious what suggestions other people might have.

That's why I wanted to ask. These types of problems, where there's no single right answer, I love seeing the various ways people might tackle it. This was my first post here, thanks for taking time to respond and for the great videos!

Hello, I've been thinking about the best approach for implementing a checkout scenario in a custom ecommerce site I've been developing and wanted to see if anyone here had advice to share.

We're not really doing guest checkout per-say for simplicity sake early on. Customers without an account just give an email up front to get started, and later on at the confirm page we'll ask for a password and make an actual account to associate the order with. This way, I kind of balance having a lower barrier to start checking out and the simplicity of backend work with all orders being associated with actual customer models.

However, what I'm most curious about, is the multi-step approach. All of the various information (shipping, billing, passwords) is being gathered across several pages. When users without an account are preparing an order, where's the best place to hold around this information? Having some sort of "Guest" Customer model might make sense, but I wasn't totally confident about this (I'm using Devise for customers). The other idea is using the session, but I wasn't sure if that's really appropriate either.

If anyone has some thoughts, that'd be great!