In my own oscommerce site, that I have been working on for about the last year as time allows, I decided to do away with the need for the clients address. I don’t need the address details as I sell only intangible products such as scripts and templates…
So, I have been locally testing a new create_account page, which looks like this;
As you can see I only have name, email, company, password. This should help to stop abandonment of carts.
I also coded up a quick and easy password generator – if the buyer clicks “or Random”, then a random password is made, inserted into the two boxes, and a message appears;
Once the person has created the account, no addresses show anywhere. This presented a bit of an issue as checkout_shipping depends upon having an valid address in order to work out postage costs. No problem for me as I do not charge postage – so simply setting the order_type to virtual skips the problem.
Next up, I had to change the address format in the database, to show only the name and company. And change some internal pages (such as checkout_confirmation) to not show the addresses (usually shows billing address and delivery address).