Opinions on the checkout process, anyone?

[eluser]slowgary[/eluser]
Hi folks,

I'm putting together an online shop and would love to get your feedback on the flow of the checkout process. The cart uses paypal and currently you'd add items to the cart, click on the link to view the cart, then click the paypal button to be whisked away for payment.

What I've aimed for was to make the process as straightforward as possible, but I don't want to miss anything important. I can get all the customer info from the PayPal IPN, I just wonder if there's a reason to have the customer create an account, like so many sites do. I understand a lot of the sites I speak of probably use a gateway and process payments on their own, but not in all cases.

So I guess my question is... is there any good reason to have the customer provide any information before pushing them to Paypal? I could see that for legal reasons I might want to have the customer sign up and agree to some terms, instead of just getting their info from the paypal transaction, but couldn't I just have a tiny 'terms & conditions' link at the bottom of the page? I really like the idea of having only 1 screen for the checkout process (plus paypal).

Thanks for reading.