Confusing card payment screens
This is a personal bugbear of mine: badly-designed payment screens. The payment stage is absolutely critical: if a site screws up here, a customer will quite often leave the journey if they:
- Get confused by what’s being asked of them
- The content of the site isn’t accurate/correct
- If the site doesn’t inspire confidence in the purchase process
With that in mind, DomainMonster should revise their card payment section:
It all starts off well: select the card type, and fill in the details…only it gets confusing because I’ve selected Visa Debit, yet each of the questions still have a * next to them, indicating they’re mandatory…except the ones with (Maestro only) are purporting to only need completing if the user has a Maestro card.
So which is it? Do I fill them in anyway? What if my card doens’t have those details on it? What if it does, but I’m being told I don’t need to complete the fields? What’ll happen if I don’t fill them in?
The problem is that these are such trivial issues, but often they’re enough to make users bail out of a journey.
The solution? Dynamically alter the question set depending on the type of card they choose from the drop-down. It’s not hard to do, and could drastically improve the usability of this section.
George
George Rosier runs this blog. It's somewhere he can vent his spleen about web design, usability, SEO, and other such nonsense that will no doubt mean nothing in 5 years' time.
You have a very good point! Leave it with me and I’ll have product team sharpen this up ASAP. Rgds, Matt, CEO
@Matt Mansell
Hi Matt, great to hear from you – and thanks for the comment. It’d be great to see this change go live as it’s a really simple one that could affect your conversion rate, so I’ll keep an eye on the site!
Incidentally, I’ve also backordered a domain from you. Fingers crossed it lapses!
The problem with this form, is that it is the same form used across just about every payment system on the web. I suppose we can only change things 1 form at a time, but we will be long dead before anything vastly improves. It’s very rare I am impressed by the easy for an ordering system, not least because so many sites run off outdated junk software such as OScommerce and ZenCart.