Required fields on check out

The email is absolutely required (as it's the main hook on user identity). The telephone field (for billing anyways) is a hard toggle setting (I'll activate that on your site for you tonight). 

Are there any other particular fields you are looking to make required?

I always though it would be really nice if EI could add this feature to the Control Panel, to allow merchants to toggle on/off which fields are required.

Now that you've brought it up, though, I'd like to add a bit to this. Since EI introduced the OPC with version 4.0 and left the phone number field optional (and then later added the hard-coded toggle) I've been scratching my head as to why. If a customers goes to register an account on the store, it's required. If admin goes to add a new customer, it's required. What's more, if admin tries to update a customer record in the Control Panel, they must input a value for the phone number field or the update won't post.

So, why only in the OPC is it not required by default? Makes no sense. Seems to me it would make much more sense to have the default be required and then if someone actually wants to have it optional, then that would be the hard-toggle option (and the customer registration and control panel should allow it to be optional as well). 

My guess is that very few merchants would want this field to be optional as the only other real means of contacting a customer about a question or issue is email, and that could be problematic (e.g. mail rejected because inbox is full; or customer either phat fingered or intentionally used a bogus email address).

Whenever we build a PC store, we always make this field required.

Hamish? What's your 2 cents on this?

Yes, it is addressed in the WIKI here: