We are ready to turn our site on for business and in preperation I've had several relatives place test orders. Three comments that have consistently come up regard entering the zip code, entering the credit card number, and the experiation date of the credit card. All three of the issues listed were identified by everyone that tested the site

The area where the zip code is entered is formatted as shown below:

[City]
[State] [Province]
[Zip]

Everyone that entered this information tried to enter the Zip into the province field. Possibly it would be better to format this as:

[City]
[State] [Province] (Putting enough space between State and Province to clue people that this isn't the zip)
[Zip]

or

[City]
[State] [Zip]
[Province]

I'm not sure how our Canadian neighbors would feel about either of these changes. Maybe one of the store owners from up north could comment on that.

The Credit Card number field should have a note saying that no spaces or dashes should be entered.

Also, the credit card experition date is formatted as MMYY. The usual way that this is shown on the credit card is MM/YY and every single tester attempted to enter the date this way. It seems odd to enter December 2005 as 1205.

I haven't been keeping up with the forums, my apologies if these issues have been discussed.

We had serious difficulties with the credit card expiration field and lost a lot of sales because of it. People could not figure it out and they would get angry.

Finally, we discovered that you can go to Order Information > Custom Payment Manager and change the Expiration Date field. We changed ours to accept more characters and also changed it to [text] so people can put whatever they want in there. It's amazing how many different ways people enter their credit card expiration dates.

Good suggestion Bookmark. I'll make that change.

Tom

I dont see where to edit the expiration date field in the custom payment manager. Do you mean you add it as an input type? Then will the gateway know that's the expiration date to use? And if you add that field, then does expiration date appear twice: once where the standard field is, and once with the custom field?

I dont get it... Can someone clarify?

I apologize for the confusion. We don't process credit cards online. It just didn't work for us. We get the credit card numbers for the orders and process them in the store manually.

I don't know about how gateways would respond to the entries. You would probably need to do test orders, or call them to find out.

We process manually as well. We're a brick and mortar store so we need the CC machine anyway.

I haven't spent much time lately on the forums. Should I post this onto the "request modifications" section to suggest the other changes?

I think it would be much better is the credit card exp date was a drop down with month and year so no typos at all.....

There are quite a few of the large sites that have changed to this just for the reasons above.

Yes, I agree. That's probably the best solution for the CC date.

Any suggestions for the zip code issue?

I know this comes a little late... but THANK YOU!!! I never realized you could customize the expiration date field. Have you changed your credit card number field to text as well? I have customers that can't figure out how to input there cc numbers.. even though it states "do not add spaces or dashes...LOL

Thanks again

Patti
www.TCWDesigns.com

I didn't change the CC number field to text, but there's no reason that you couldn't as long as you're processing CC orders by hand.

How did you know that users were having problems with the format? Other than emails from customers and using unsuspecting relatives as testers I haven't found a good way to tell why users dropped the cart.