One of the secrets to improving your conversion rates is removing everything that isn't essential to the checkout process to keep the user on track. We can improve the checkout experience so that, when the user opens the Terms & Conditions page, it will open in a pop-up. There won't be anything that can distract them, and the only thing they can do is close the window. This should improve your conversion rates.
These distractions were a pain that I felt while using WooCommerce stores, so I built the plugin that we're going to be using in this recipe.
You'll need the WooCommerce Terms and Conditions Popup plugin (available on WooThemes.com) installed and activated on your store. You'll also need to have a Terms & Conditions page set in WooCommerce. See the preceding recipe for more details.
You don't actually have to do anything. This plugin does just one thing and it does it very well. Just by activating the plugin, your Terms & Conditions page will automatically open in a pop-up.
There is one setting we can tweak to make the experience a bit better. By default, the plugin will just load a pop-up that the user can read and then click off to dismiss it. I think it's a better experience to put an Agree button at the bottom of the page. Let's take a look at the following steps:
- From the WordPress admin, go to WooCommerce | Settings | Checkout.
- Check the Add "Agree" button setting.
- Click on Save changes.
Now the user will have to scroll down to the bottom of the pop-up and click on the Agree button. This will close the pop-up and check the box for the user.
Many people have a Terms and Conditions page to protect themselves in case of litigation. If you wish to be thorough and have a record of each customer agreeing to the Terms and Conditions, there is a tutorial by Remi Corson on how to do this at http://www.remicorson.com/storing-woocommerce-terms-conditions-in-the-database/.