Accepted payment types not clear enough at checkout

Shwamee — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 00:05:04 +0000

Hi guys -

I had a customer try to complete his checkout several times using an American Express card number – I only accept Visa/Mastercard. In that situation, your payment screen just comes back as it was, with no error message or explanation. Not only that, the form comes back still filled in, with the card number and everything.

I just tested this out and I can see how it would be very confusing. For instance…

what happened?
did my order go in?
was my card accepted?
was my card rejected?
what happens if I hit the button again?
will I get charged twice?

It really looks – to a customer – like some kind of bug in my shop.

I’d like to see a change, wherein one of the following solutions is implemented:

Make the acceptable card type icons more prominent – perhaps slightly larger icons and a “we accept the following payment types” header or something.

Display an appropriate error message when the payment page refreshes in this situation, so the customer doesn’t wonder what’s going on.

Force the user to choose a card type from a drop-down of those that are accepted by the shop. Nothing need be done with this field, it just forces the user to notice what’s accepted.

Thanks.

tg4fsi commented

tg4fsi — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 02:00:07 +0000

I agree…the other problem we have with our test customers (we haven’t gone live yet) is that when you get to the checkout page, we see the PayPal and Google Checkout buttons at the top. Yes, we accept both but you cannot tell that we also accept all the major credit cards.

By putting those to icons up top you don’t realize those are options besides using a credit card. Can those be moved or at least some wording put there to indicate the full menu of options?

If not, we’re going to remove both of them and switch to a different checkout system.

Thanks,
Erik

ladybugspicnic commented

ladybugspicnic — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 17:25:54 +0000

tg4fsi – You can mod the checkout.css and use a background image to show accepted payment methods…

http://forums.shopify.com/categories/1/posts/14487

tg4fsi commented

tg4fsi — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 20:48:34 +0000

Yes I found that thread after I posted! Thanks for the help…I think I really need to get a better CSS book…I only have a “Learn CSS in 24 Hours” but I think I need something better.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Erik

ladybugspicnic commented

ladybugspicnic — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 01:07:03 +0000

Try this http://www.westciv.com/style_master/house/index.html. Their CSS Editor is quite good if your on Windows…

lorem ipsum commented

lorem ipsum — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 22:27:45 +0000

@tg4fsi

Welcome to the wonderful wacky world of css :)

Some other pointers that might prove useful:

Download and use Firefox for viewing your css-based site. Firefox interprets css correctly most of the time. If it looks right in FF it will usually be pretty close in Opera… Safari… Netscape… Camino… Konqueror etc etc…

IE in its various flavours mis-interprets css in a variety of infuriating ways. Fortunately there are some clever people who have worked out ways of bullying IE into cooperating. Get it to look right in FF then hack for IE.

Don’t trust Dreamweaver either, I use it and love it, but it’s css rendering is still really buggy.

Add the ‘developer toolbar’ add-on to FF and you’ll get a whole heap of tools that help you identify which bits are where, how big they are, and generally identify and diagnose problems. You can even try out edits in the browser to see what might work, then copy the succesful options to your stylesheet.

Take a look at position is everything
and a list apart for some great articles.

And lastly: Google is your friend.

If you think css is misbehaving chances are someone else has had the same problem and worked out how to fix it.

Good luck!
Mike

Conrad Decker commented

Conrad Decker — Tue, 27 May 2008 23:50:50 +0000

Unfortunately, I really don’t think this is an answer to the problem. Unless, I’m missing something.

In all honesty, even if there are notices all over your site telling your visitors that you don’t accept Amex – they’re still going to try to use it. And they’ll be confused when it doesn’t work. Okay…maybe that’s pushing it a little bit, but there is some truth to that. You can’t accept user input and just assume it’s going to be okay :-)

I would really like to see a better resolution to this problem if that’s possible. I think it’s a bigger problem then some would tend to think. Would it be a pain to add an error message stating that the credit card type that they are attempting to use isn’t accepted?

tobi commented

tobi — Wed, 28 May 2008 00:15:58 +0000

This thread is from Dec 07, we have since improved the issue by very clearly stating the error messages, automatically informing the merchant of such errors by email and making the accepted credit cards selectable.