by vedantkhairnar on 6/21/23, 6:33 AM with 151 comments
by nicbou on 6/21/23, 7:48 AM
My phone number starts with +49 and is longer than a North American phone number. This prevents me from renting a Bixi bicycle in Montreal. You know who likes to rent bicycles? Tourists like me.
In any case my card failed with a generic error, both at the payment booth, and in the mobile app (after working one time).
Another one was a stand up paddling booking website. I shouldn’t need a Canadian postal code to rent something (especially 10km from the border) yet here we are. In any case it was impossible to select the field on my phone, so I dropped out. I wonder how much business they lost to this single bug.
This sort of stuff happens when you ask for data that you don’t need, and validate it beyond your needs. I fight tooth and nail with colleagues to reduce the size of forms to avoid this sort of friction and bugs.
EDIT: oh and IBAN discrimination, which is illegal but happens even on government websites
by Symbiote on 6/21/23, 7:29 AM
Eventually I gave up with that site, and tried the same booking on a different website. It immediately said "Your bank has declined the transaction. Either you have insufficient funds in your account, or the transaction is above the bank's limit for this card." Annoying, but checking on the bank's website revealed there was an unspecified limit. The first site would have got the sale (with a different card) if they'd given me a clear error message.
by sdflhasjd on 6/21/23, 8:09 AM
If I see anything that even feels like a dark pattern, I will just refuse out of principle.
by chrismorgan on 6/21/23, 8:05 AM
> • Not having dynamic error validations before someone goes ahead with the payment. It is as simple as using the Luhn algorithm to make some basic checks.
On the other hand, someone that does validation of their own is far more likely to accidentally filter out valid values. This used to be rather common on email addresses. (I’ve been using almost exclusively @chrismorgan.info addresses since about 2010, and had one rejected exactly once, from a regular expression that thought TLDs were only two or three characters long; I was able to use my skills to bypass the check, and the backend accepted it.) Nowadays, people normally just leave client side validation to whatever <input type="email"> does.
So, payment card numbers. I’ve only ever had a 16-digit one, but they can actually be 10–19 characters long, and some people are sure to have hard-coded maxlength=16 and/or minlength=16 (or equivalent JavaScript checks).
There are also those ridiculous things that insist on splitting the card number into multiple fields (four groups of four characters), but that’s generally just painful to work with rather than actually preventing you from using it.
by JCharante on 6/21/23, 7:50 AM
I hate dropdowns for the expiry date. Let me just enter 01 TAB 22, I don't want to click on dropdowns then scrolldown.
by fhd2 on 6/21/23, 8:11 AM
I'm in Germany and order at a lot of specific sites, and while I don't like PayPal as a company or their fee structure, it's usually what keeps me sane. Most cases I don't have to enter anything, no need to create an account or even enter the delivery address. Doesn't get much more convenient than that.
by MrThoughtful on 6/21/23, 8:55 AM
You put data into a form of a random website you want to pay a small amount to. Data which enables everybody who has it to cause trouble. Trouble to you, trouble to your credit card company, trouble to other websites who get scammed with it.
Websites should simply give you a string like "visa:3498734219:$12.34" where "visa" is their payment processor, 349... is the invoice nr and $12.34 is the amount invoiced. Then you copy+paste that into the website of your payment solution and let it do the transaction.
And if you don't like copy+paste, you install some app so you can just point your phone at such an invoice and click pay. Or a browser plugin which detects those invoices and asks you "Pay this?".
by bengale on 6/21/23, 7:35 AM
by nicexe on 6/21/23, 8:34 AM
Selecting a country and entering the post code to find out the shipping cost is slightly old-fashioned but works very well.
by jiehong on 6/21/23, 8:42 AM
Once you start using something with a QR Code, it's much much better:
- WeChat Pay and co. (in China);
- PhonePe and co (in India);
You usually have 2 ways to pay with those systems (only systems I'm familiar with, others might be different):
- Merchand shows a QR Code; you scan it and enter the right amount manually. Merchand gets a confirmation.
- Merchand shows a QR Code; you scan it but the amount and details are all pre-filled and you just have to confirm.
In both cases, it's scan + click ok.
Now, if worldwide banks in the world were to have a way to send money to each other without fees and with a single standard, they could make it happen (one can hope).
by andygh on 6/21/23, 8:58 AM
by dan_mctree on 6/21/23, 7:59 AM
by nakulkothari on 6/21/23, 9:12 AM
The redirection flow is when you break from the flow of your website and use the processor’s hosted checkout page. It is worth putting in the extra effort to blend the payment page until the end of the checkout experience to not lose your customer’s flow of attention. PayPal one-click checkout button is an example of paypal’s SDK flow.
You actually don’t need the user to reach the final checkout page with all these icons and progressive disclosures for checking out with Paypal
by Towaway69 on 6/21/23, 9:20 AM
If the object is a product, then the force is advertising.
How boring.
by stokesr on 6/21/23, 8:45 AM
I definitely prefer being able to go through inputting my card details using the numpad and the tab key. Having to switch more often between keyboard and mouse adds one more step to the nightmare that is online payment. While it is just a preference though, I wouldn't go so far as to say a date dropdown automatically means bonus points.
by quickthrower2 on 6/21/23, 7:29 AM
Emphasis: Your
by MzHN on 6/21/23, 9:02 AM
The experience of throwing money at them is so satisfying, I almost want to do it just for the rare feeling of zero friction.
If I do want to pay on your website, and it is not as low friction in comparison, I will be considering how much I really want to pay or if I should just give up.
by Loranubi on 6/21/23, 9:14 AM
Once I booked a flight online by credit card and the payment timed out (or rather stopped at a late stage without an error). Afterwards the website didn't tell me if the payment went through or not. I called the airline and my bank and neither one could tell me if the payment was successful or not. Both just told me to wait a week and then check again... this was only around 5 years ago.
In the end the payment did go through, however if it didn't, I am sure I would have lost that seat/ticket. Lots of wasted time and stress for nothing.
by Turing_Machine on 6/21/23, 12:10 PM
My first encounter with him was when I was selecting classes and asked a friend "Hey, do you know anything about (short version of his name)?" "Yeah, he's great. That's not really his name, though. That's just all that will fit in the schedule."
by yawnxyz on 6/21/23, 7:51 AM
Though I'm not a huge fan of opening up a new window for payment, this turns out to be much easier for us, implementation-wise. Plus, the Stripe Payment Link UI is able to handle most of the errors and payment methods, add discount codes, etc.
by notpushkin on 6/21/23, 8:07 AM
I usually don't mind those because you can just Tab to them and start typing and it will select the item from the list (if you have guessed the format right, and the dropdowns are native or custom but properly implemented). But why would you ever want that instead of simple MM / YYYY field (or two fields, if you don't want to add masking)?
by KnobbleMcKnees on 6/21/23, 8:08 AM
Also it's a bit lacking on the stateful side of things. For example, a lot of Amazon customers hit "save card details" and then bam, one click checkout forever; making optimisation in this area highly diminished. Similar story and even more true for vendors that support Apple Pay.
by danmaz74 on 6/21/23, 8:55 AM
by RobotToaster on 6/21/23, 9:15 AM
by vedantkhairnar on 6/21/23, 9:04 AM
by colesantiago on 6/21/23, 8:46 AM
The amount of spying in the payments industry is vile enough.
by kumarajeet024 on 6/21/23, 9:02 AM
by NavyG on 6/21/23, 6:51 AM
by yieldcrv on 6/21/23, 7:51 AM
Apple Pay in browser checkout is pretty great
by dorianmariefr on 6/21/23, 7:39 AM
by supriyo-biswas on 6/21/23, 7:44 AM