My organization is currently using Kingston. We only have two service catalog items live on the service portal at this time. Neither uses the cart functionality. I have been tasked with setting up hardware and software catalog items using the cart and checkout functionality on the service portal. I am in the process of determining whether to enable two-step checkout (Order Confirmation) or not. Please note, I have minimal experience using and maintaining a service catalog, and I do not want to go down a path that I'll regret taking later.
Below is my list of pros and cons (based on other posts in the community). I hope that those of you with more experience than me will review the list and confirm my understanding of the functionality is correct. Plus, share any additional thoughts and lessons learned with me based on your own experience.
PROS:
I'd like to avoid requiring our users to enter the Requested For, Shipping Address, and Special Instructions for each item as they add items to the cart. Based on preliminary testing, it appears that using the two-step checkout will allow users to add all of their desired items to the cart then specify the Requested For, Shipping Address, and Special Instructions once during checkout.*
*I recognize that I am making a big assumption that the user building the cart would be requesting items for either themselves or another single user and all the items would be delivered to the same address.
CONS:
- Once enabled, the two-step checkout process applies to all service catalog items and order guides. Others have expressed concern in the community posts that the Order Confirmation screen confuses users when it pops up at the end of an order guide. My organization has not created any order guides yet. However, we might use them in the future. It is my understanding that widget customization is required to override this behavior for a specific item(s).
- Our two existing service catalog items that do not use the cart captures the 'Requested for' value as a variable then copies it to a custom field named u_requested_for on the RITM form. When testing the two-step checkout/order confirmation functionality using service catalog items that do not have a variable for 'Request for' (because we plan to ask for the information during the check-out process), the custom field is not being populated because there is no variable. I thought I would be able to set up a business rule to copy the 'Requested For' value captured during two-step checkout/order confirmation from the REQ form down to the RITM. However, I quickly learned that this is not so easy because the RITM is created before the REQ. I do not know how to overcome this issue. Any ideas?
- In the future, we might want to allow users to build carts containing items for multiple users and shipping to multiple addresses.
- If we wanted to add fields to the Order Confirmation screen, it introduces additional customization and complexity to the situation that I may not have the skill set to execute at this time.
At this point, I am leaning towards not using (disabling) the two-step checkout/order confirmation. However, I am worried that there are some benefits that I am missing and not considering.
Thanks in advance for any input you are willing to provide.
