One of the cool things about writing a blog is that you get instant feedback. Usually people ask for my help customizing plugins but sometimes the feedback can spin up a new project. That's what happened with a blog post I wrote back in December. I mentioned that it would be possible to open the WooCommerce Terms & Conditions in a popup and I got email after email asking me how to do it.
After a dozen emails I decided to dig into this and came up with the WooCommerce Terms & Conditions Popup extension.
Why Make This
I probably don't say no as often as Chris Lema but I do say it a lot. I'm very serious when it comes to new projects. When I take on a new project I commit. That includes the initial time investment and also all the bug fixes that come later. So why did I take this on when I have plenty of other projects to maintain and a book to write?
Because it's a simple solution to improve your checkout conversion. By keeping people on the checkout page they're less likely to ADD and run off. Keeping people in your sales funnel is essential. That's why big retailers like Amazon remove menus and such once you've entered the checkout.
I love highly focused little plugins like this. They do exactly one thing and do it well. And for stores that are doing hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in transactions a year even a small conversation rate increase can bring you thousands of extra dollars and that easily justifies the cost.
So to all of my blog readers thanks. You proved to me that this idea could work and I'm really happy with the end result.
Happy improving your checkout and improving your conversion rate! 🙂
That looks great, Patrick. Is it universal for all sales or can it show when only certain products are in the cart?
Thanks Doug! This extension opens up the Terms & Conditions page for WooCommerce. As far as I know there isn’t a prebuilt way to have certain T&Cs display per product. If that does exist I could probably update this extension to work with any number of T&Cs.
You got a point there…. but i have the same question as doug have… will it be universal or work only where there are some products in the cart?
It works just like the default WooCommerce Terms & Conditions. And that works for every product.
Thanks for the plugin Patrick! I’d like to force the user to open the popup, read the terms and conditions, and then either Agree or Disagree. Selecting either of these options would close the popup, and if the user selected “Agree”, the checkbox would be automatically checked. I wouldn’t want the user to be able to check or uncheck the box without actually reading the terms and conditions in the popup. Have you considered adding this feature to your plugin or gotten feedback from anyone else on this?
Hey Kristy,
I’ve seen feedback like that but I feel that it’s out of scope. We’re currently talking to ApproveMe about a really full fledged terms and conditions setup where terms are decided based on which products are in the cart. And there should also be options to force the user to read the T&Cs.
Thanks for providing this plugin.
I agree with Kristy though. This extension can be improved. If there’s nothing forcing the user to open the terms and conditions dialogue, chances are most customers are clicking the checkbox and bypassing your plugin altogether, not very effective. Furthermore, an agree and disagree button should be present, to allow for an honest answer. Adding a disagree button to close the lightbox would take 10 seconds to create.
For selfish reasons, it would be nice if the default styling of this plugin were a little nicer. Black and white with Times New Roman is a bit hard to look at and requires some digging to figure out how to change the css on this plugin. When buying a premium extension from woothemes, there is a certain expectation that the style of each plugin will be somewhat uniform, at least not ugly! :p
Any chance you could post a couple classes or ids I can add to my theme’s stylesheet to change the whitebox properties and the Agree button properties?
Thanks!
Hey David,
I’m really against forcing the T&C open. That will make store owners think it is official and it really isn’t. A T&C like this is little more than a hand shake in a court of law. If you need to force your users to read it you need something different.
For classes and IDs it’s always best to look through the source code. Some IDs are
TB_overlay&TB_window. It’s best for you to look through the source code to see how to style these.It should look good by default. I use TwentyTwelve and TwentyFifteen and it looks great those themes. It shouldn’t really need much styling.
Thanks for providing this plugin.
If I want to configure the terms and conditions for certain products only and not for the others, how do I disable function for the rest and enable for those certain products? Especially on how to turn off the validation of the terms and conditions checkbox field when it is disabled, and turn on when enabled? Please advise, thanks.
You could do this programmatically for certain products. But that would require custom coding. Have you thought about have a general ToC & then having specific parts of it only apply to certain products?
Basically have everyone agree to the ToC and all of the ToCs for all products are on that one page.
Have proposed that, but the requirement is only to show for products of booking type nature, not the rest like simple, variable kind. I know there is a need for custom coding, it is the validation part now causing a problem. Where is the part to turn off the validation and turn on the validation? Please advise, thanks.
Hi Patrick,
Thanks for providing this plugin again.
How to turn off the validation checking for some products? And turn back on for some other products? Where is the part to do this? Please advise, thanks.
What do the terms and conditions check box do not see?