Segregating the Shipping and Billing pages
In an Elite starter store that is enabled with Order and Quote Capture Integration, a customer enters the shipping information on the Shipping page and the schedule order and billing information on the Billing page. In the base Elite starter store, however, all the shipping and billing information can be entered on a single Shipping and Billing page.
To display the billing details, the correct value for the order total must be displayed to the customer. If the shipping information is on the same page, then every time the customer changes shipping options, it is necessary to call the external system to ensure that the correct and final total value is displayed in the billing section. Frequent calls to the external system might lead to performance issues.
By putting shipping and billing information on separate pages, the shipping page might not show the correct and final total as the order calculations are performed using values that are cached in WebSphere Commerce. Then, when the customer moves to the Billing page, a single external call is made to display the correct and final order total to the customer when the payment information is entered.
In the base Elite starter store, the Order calculation totals, such as tax and shipping charge are displayed in the Shipping and Billing, Order Summary, and Order Confirmation pages. For the Order and Quote Capture Integration, these calculations are made in the external system and values that are retrieved by making external web service calls. Hence, if external web service calls are made on each of the above pages, performance will degrade drastically. Also, since these are calculations, and an updated value needs to be displayed each time, caching cannot be used here.
A customer would always like to view the final Order totals before entering the billing information. Hence, the Billing section, along with Schedule Orders section, has been segregated from the Shipping page. So, for the Order and Quote Capture Integration framework, the navigation is:
Also, the Order calculation totals, such as tax and shipping charge, that require an external web service call, are not displayed on the Shipping page. It is not necessary to make an external web service call on the Shipping page. The Order calculation totals are displayed on the Billing page.