As rewriting CD Baby, I’ve been doing some interesting experiments in questioning things that we take for granted as “that’s how ecommerce works” - but really aren’t what they seem.
Some examples:
BILLING ADDRESS
Is the billing address for an order really an attribute of the order?
Think about when you really use it… only for credit card orders.
Credit cards are only one way to order. There’s also PayPal, cash, check, C.O.D., gift certificates, and more we haven’t imagined yet.
So… really “Billing Address” is an attribute of the Credit Card being used, that’s all.
No credit card? No billing address.
There’s no reason to ask people for a billing address unless they are paying by credit card - and it should probably be asked for right next to the credit card number and expiration date to make it clear as possible that you just need the address the bills go to, for verification.
POSTALCODE / STATE
Some countries have no postalcode (Ireland, Hong Kong).
Most countries have no “state” or province.
If you ask people their country, first, you won’t need to ask them these un-necessary things.
“CREATE AN ACCOUNT” / PASSWORD
Only 15% of our customers ever return.
Why are we requiring 100% of them to create an account, then?
An account (with a password) is only needed IF you return back some day to buy more.
Why not skip the “create an account” processes for everyone, and make it an OPTIONAL thing you can do AFTER your first order, so that IF you think you might want to return some day you can create an account.
85% of people will never need it, and appreciate you for skpping it. Maybe they’ll even be more likely to return because you made their 1st-time shopping experience so easy.
CREDIT CARD TYPE
If it starts with “3″ it’s American Express. “4″ is Visa. “5″ is Mastercard. “6″ is Discover.
So why do online stores require people to tell them what kind of card they are entering? Just looking at the first digit will tell them. It doesn’t really matter, anyway, because either it verifies with the bank or it doesn’t.
Any other un-necessary things you’ve encountered in your online shopping experience?
Any other un-necessary things you’ve encountered in your online shopping experience?
Re:
I wish I could find the stuff now, but lots of the discussion that brian d foy had about how to handle int’l subscribers of The Perl Review was about entering addresses.
It culminated in the conclusion that you should not have individual input fields for each part of the shipping address. There are so many national and local variations and variants on the address theme that it’s impossible to adequately capture them all.
If you want to print appropriate labels for shipping to customers outside your own country/local area, you must give the user a textarea for free-form address entry.
Re: international addressing
See this post:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/6669
I was just about to go down the 'open text box' solution, too, until I realized that when sending packages through FedEx, DHL, etc - they require that the address be broken into name, address1, address2, city, province, postalcode, country.
Overly particular formatting rules; doubling
This is a common gripe but I see it everywhere. Credit cards as printed have spaces in them, as do the mailed statements that everybody gets. Yet for some reason we are required to strip out spaces and hyphens and just enter a 16 digit number, which of course makes it harder to get right. It's so easy to use a regex to remove these that it's just programmer laziness as far as I can tell.
Also, my address has a # sign in it: #2. Many web sites refuse to accept that for no apparent reason.
Some sites require you to enter plain text information twice as though it were a password. I've seen this with email addresses in particular. It doesn't make sense since it's a cleartext field, not a password field. Nobody asks me to do that with my credit card number but somehow people who can read a credit card are assumed to be too dumb to know their own email address?
Secret questions are pretty bogus too. I really don't want to be forced to hand out my mother's maiden name or my place of birth or the last 4 digits of my SSN just because someone decided that emailing me my password at my registered address was less secure. Spreading those faux-secret information tidbits all over the world is more of a security risk in my opinion.
My #1 web design peeve is probably the popup streaming video browser window. Having been forced to implement one in the past, I now hate them ten times as much. Just download a metafile and let the helper app play it. It's always so annoying if a clip is dead or if the player I have is incompatible, since the designer typically hides all of the status information and just shows the teeny rectangle of video which in this case is just a dead black rectangle of nothingness that doesn't tell me what's wrong. Or perhaps the plugin rectangle isn't quite the right size for the controls so they are half-embedded under the rest of that browser window so I can't adjust the volume. Or maybe the plugin is fighting with the browser so the controls are drawing at 0,0 relative to the browser window or display rather than relative to the bottom of the video clip, so I have to click a little circle that's all by itself to stop the clip.
*sigh* there's just so much junk... I'd better stop. :)
Re:
Secret questions are pretty bogus too.
Indeed. See Bruce Schneier:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/02/the_curse_of_th.html
Definition of Billing Address
Here's a definition from the MIT:
http://web.mit.edu/ecommerce/www/glossary.html
Looks like you are right on target; my only concern would be wholesale/retail business orders that need to keep billing and shipping address separate, for whatever reason.
I really appreciate the fresh view you bring into this area of e-commerce.
Valid Email Address
I get irked a whole lot when my email address is rejected as "invalid"
l-i-e.com is my domain name.
I can't count the number of web apps that force me to use one of the other domains I control to provide an email.
For that matter, why force a "valid" email anyway?
You KNOW I can just sign up for a free account and nuke it right after I get your secret test email to "prove" it's valid.
And passwords.
For the love of [deity] do *NOT* require a password unless you really really really have to.