Saturday, August 06, 2005

Rant: You want my money?

To all you companies out there that want to take my money, and want me to pay you by credit card, on the internet. When you ask for my credit card number, you've got three choices:

1 - Build the entryboxes so that it doesn't matter if I put spaces or dashes in, just let my format the number 1234-1234-1234-1234, strip the number out and just use that.

2 - Build the entry boxes so that I can't put spaces, dashes or too many characters in and make it clear that I can't. That way I'll type my credit card number with just the numbers.

3 - Let me type a combination of spaces, dashes and numbers in the way that's natural to me, then tell me I'm an idiot. Give me messages like "Your credit card number has too many characters, please try again", or (my personal favourite) "You have entered your card number with spaces, please enter just numbers".

Guess which option will reduce the chances of me using your company next time. Guess which option your company most likely uses.

1 comment:

MikeH said...

Some companies think it is a good idea to keep customers who want to pay them on hold... for two and a half hours.