When people are buying things online, they usually know what fields for Name, Email, Phone, Address, City, State and Zip are for. These fields do not need descriptions.

Not only are these descriptions not helpful ("Please enter your X" adds no value to an empty field already labeled X), but they clutter the user interface. It's been proven that interfaces with more clutter actually decrease conversions (in this case, sales), so the additional text here will actually hurt sites that choose to use this module.

In order for Drupal developers to produce quality sites that use this module, they'll need to write their own custom module to remove this description text. This is time unnecessarily spent cleaning up Drupal's user interface (which gets a bad rap already) and also increasing the cost of Drupal development (another area where Drupal gets a bad rap.) My custom module contains one of these:

/**
 * Implements hook_form_FORM_ID_alter().
 *
 * Removes help text on checkout form.
 */
function MODULENAME_form_basic_cart_checkout_form_alter(&$form, $form_state) {
  unset($form['basic_cart_checkout_name']['#description']);
  unset($form['basic_cart_checkout_email']['#description']);
  unset($form['basic_cart_checkout_phone']['#description']);
  unset($form['basic_cart_checkout_city']['#description']);
  unset($form['basic_cart_checkout_zipcode']['#description']);
  unset($form['basic_cart_checkout_address']['#description']);
}

I really appreciate the existence of this module as an alternative to the goliaths that are Ubercart and Drupal Commerce, but let's do an awesome job for the little guys too!

The attached patch cleans up the UI for the 7.x-2.0-rc1 version. I tried to find where the checkout form was created in both the 2.0-dev and 3.0-dev versions, but it looks like it may have accidentally been removed. I'll create a follow-up issue for that as well.

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Comments

jenlampton’s picture

Issue summary: View changes
Alex Dicianu’s picture

Thanks for the patch! Regarding the text descriptions, you are right. I will apply the patch shortly.