29 Dec New Checkout Process

Gannett’s checkout process is challenging, because print and digital-only subscriptions utilize two different back-end/billing systems.

The reasoning behind this is that the print information is stored in an older legacy system, which can’t support the product bundling needed for digital-only.

Since the future of journalism is digital, we’re concentrating our development resources to improve that area first.

We’ve divided the checkout process into three simple steps: account creation, payment, and confirmation.

First, we need to create an account for the customer. We ask them to give us an email address, password, and their full name, which we associate with a license on the backend.

From there we take them into the payment step of the process. At this point they can select their preferred method of payment, anything from their credit card to various express methods.

Once the customer has successfully submits payment, they’re taken to a confirmation screen,where we surface a note from the editor, along with a confirmation number, onboarding tips and a few other modules.

The customer has the option for beginning the onboarding process at this point, or begin consuming content immediately.

We’d prefer that they onboard immediately, but it’s ultimately their call, so in the event that they don’t onboard at this time, we have other methods to surface information to them to ensure that they educated as to the full extent of their benefits.

The confirmation screen is an important part of the process, and customers have told us that they appreciate being thanked for their purchase, as it’s not typical.