Easy Magento Checkout Page Improvements

Here are a couple of easy improvements that you can make to your Magento store checkout page in order to eliminate a few extra clicks for customers. All it takes is 2 lines of javascript.

(1) Select "Checkout as Guest" by default

(2) Select "Ship to this Address" by default

If you notice that most customers use the same billing and shipping address, you may want to select the "Ship to this Address" option by default so that customers can skip the shipping address step.

In order to set these defaults, you need to modify the opcheckout.js file located at:

    frontend/base/default/js/opcheckout.js

(* Note, you may want to move this file to frontend/default/default/js/opcheckout.js and modify it there to avoid modifying core magento code)

Add this code to the end of the initialize function:

 
initialize: function(accordion, urls){
    ...
 
    // Set guest checkout by default
    if ($('login:guest')) $('login:guest').checked=true; 
 
    // Set shipping = billing by default
    if ($('billing:use_for_shipping_yes')) $('billing:use_for_shipping_yes').checked=true; 
},
 

Then refresh your browser cache and test it out.

Keep in mind that when you update Magento, the opcheckout.js file may be different in the new version, so you may have to do this change again.