Once your shop is published, a shopper can add a product to a basket, check out and place an order, all on your shop's own address. This guide is what they see at each step, so you know what you are answering for. It is not a claim that any shop has done this yet: none has taken an order so far, and the screens below have been built and tested but not yet used by a real customer.
Adding to the basket
Every product page has an add-to-basket button. It carries the price the page showed. If you raise a price while a shopper is reading, they pay the price they saw, for the refresh window you chose on the Prices tab plus five minutes. A rise of more than half, or of more than ₹2,000 on one line, is not honoured. The shopper is then told the price has changed, in a sentence on the page, rather than the button quietly doing nothing.
The basket
The basket lists each line with its price, one-fewer and one-more buttons, and a Remove link. Shoppers can type a coupon code and apply it, and take it off again.
- The total is the shop's figure, or there is none. It says it includes tax, and that delivery is added once the shopper says where the parcel is going. If the shop cannot work out a price it shows We cannot price this basket with the reason, and the Check out button is disabled. It never falls back to adding up the lines, because that sum has no tax or delivery in it and would read as the price.
- An empty basket, an unreadable one and a shop that is not taking orders are three different screens. A shopper with nothing in the basket is told so. A basket that could not be loaded says it could not be loaded. A shop that is not switched on for orders says it is not taking orders yet, and offers no button that could not work.
The checkout
Check out opens a page of its own, which starts with Start checkout. There are four parts, and the Pay button stays disabled until the server says the checkout is ready, so a shopper cannot pay too early.
- Delivery address. House or street, an optional area, town or city, state and PIN code.
- Delivery. The delivery choices for that address, each with its price. If none is available the page says why, and it does not say we do not deliver there unless that is what was found.
- How would you like to pay? The ways to pay your shop offers, each with a sentence under it. A way to pay you have not set up is not offered. If the shop could not check one just now, the page says some ways to pay could not be checked, rather than showing a shorter list as if it were complete. With none available the shopper is told the shop cannot take payments yet and that nothing has been charged.
- Total to pay. The figure comes from the server, and the Pay button works only when the server says the checkout is ready.
Cash on delivery, and direct UPI
Two ways to pay depend on choices you make in the shop console, and each behaves differently from a provider payment.
- Cash on delivery is offered only after you have made the decision on the Cash on delivery tab. If you chose to confirm the address by text, then once the shopper picks cash on delivery they are asked to confirm it with a code we text to their mobile, and Pay stays disabled until they do. The code goes to the number already on their session, never to one typed into the page.
- Direct UPI shows your UPI handle, the amount, a QR code and a reference to put in the payment note, then asks the shopper to attach a receipt. It carries a shop confirms mark on the button. The shopper cannot place the order until you confirm the payment on the Payments tab. Read Take UPI straight into your bank before you switch it on.
Placing the order
When the payment is in place the shopper presses Place order and sees Your order is placed with an order reference. Pressing it twice does not create two orders. If something after the order was recorded did not finish, the shopper still sees the order as placed, so nobody who has paid is sent to place a second one. A refusal means nothing was written, and the shopper is told so.
A checkout that sits too long expires. The page says so and links back to the basket, and the shopper starts again from there. Orders placed this way come in with your other online orders; see Online orders for what you do next.
What this is not, yet
- No shop has taken an order through these screens yet, so how they feel to a real customer is untested.
- Shipping is not automated by the checkout. It offers delivery choices and records the one chosen, and nothing in it books a courier by itself.
- If you use your own domain, the HTTPS certificate is not issued for you today, so do not send customers to a custom address until that is settled. Your shop console says where each domain stands.