I love Webflow. I want to run my store from Webflow. But boy, in so many bafflying ways, do you guys make it hard. Lemme point out one oversight from the checkout that makes me wonder how seriously Webflow takes ecommerce: phone numbers.
“Phone numbers?” you say.
Yeah. Phone numbers. Try to ship an item with almost any major logistics company in the world without a customer’s phone number and see how that works out.
We ship internationally with DHL, for example, and you simply cannot get a package sent with DHL without a customer’s phone number. It’s used for verification, security and for SMS updates if you want a kick-ass customer experience. It’s essential - if you don’t have it, you can’t send your package.
And so for some reason there’s no customer phone number field in Webflow’s checkout and no ability to add one. As a workaround, we’ve placed a “phone number” label above the second address line field to trick the customer into believing that’s what its for. It’s an awful solution at best, and will hurt us at some point at worst.
And if we didn’t do it, we couldn’t ship. Period.
But - why? How could an oversight this important even exist?
I’m baffled.
Another example of baffling omission: checkout fields types. Checkout fields aren’t given the correct “type” (and it can’t be set manually): the email field on a mobile device, for example, will auto-capitalises and does not display the @ symbol in the keyboard.
These oversights, from websites that rely on mobile traffic (all of them?) can cause serious user input errors.
Customers don’t always fix this on their own (in fact, they rarely do). So we need to make sure that the email address isn’t capitalised. We need to make sure the last name is capitalised (and actually exists), because there’s only one name field rather than a “first” and “last”. We need to double and triple-check our customers address because we only have one field now instead of two, and Webflow doesn’t hook into an address validator; anyone who’s run a store or had experience with logistics knows customers are just awful at entering their own addresses in (or other people’s).
Stores can’t afford to lose packages.
I could go on. But my point is just this - it feels like the checkout is an afterthought. And let me tell you, anyone who’s listening at Webflow, the checkout matters. It matters to our customers and it matters to us. It affects our sales and it affects our speed. It needs to be done right.