make billing address optional

I agree. Does anyone know whether this is going to be implemented?

the entire checkout needs to be streamlined.

There are other factors like tax that need to be taken into consideration such as if you have to apply a tax like GST you need to know who you are billing because they may or may not be elligiable to pay tax.

This is part of an underlying problem.

What follows is about 4.6; I haven't looked at 4.7.

The payment modules should have:
- the ability to check that the info that has been submitted is appropriate for that payment method
- the ability to specify the address format required

Actually, it might not only be the payment modules that should be able register address requirements, there's a note somewhere that says that tax modules have some address requirements too for GST (General Sales Tax).

The address module should communicate with the payment method modules to get the definitions of requirements, and collect the specific details for that payment type.

The workflow order should be fixed to:
payment type screen, addresses, checking

This order allows you to collect only the data required for that particular payment type.

The address module should provide a mechanism to define extra fields that should be collected.

What holes can you find in these proposals?

What needs to be done is to create some form of address api which allows other modules which may determine which addresses are needed.

so if you are using the tax module the billing address is always required, the tangible module will determine that it needs the shipping address, and so forth.

This would mean that adding defaults for displaying both/either of the billing and shipping address would be much easier.

But I am a bit reluctant to create a new api. Maybe you could use the hook_ecommerce() and extend this to allow to ask the question of which addresses need to be collected.

We are not supporting 4.6 now. Please re-open if any problems.

set won't fix