Tell HN: Credit Card type is very easy to ascertain from the number

pedalpete · on Feb 23, 2010

The 'what type of card' field should be before the number. I believe it should be a method of informing your users what cards you accept, rather than figuring out what card you are using. The same can be accomplished with an image of accepted cards, but I think the text version is more accessible.

dangrossman · on Feb 23, 2010

Users expect it and are confused when an expected field is absent. You don't want to make a customer think twice about you when they have their wallet out and are about to make a purchase.

vaporstun · on Feb 23, 2010

I highly disagree with you. The less roadblocks you put in the way of a customer purchasing something, the more likely you are to get a conversion.

By this logic, Amazon's One-Click purchase would be a failure because people "expect" to have to enter their address and billing info every time. That's simply not the case.

Furthermore, some sites require this piece of data, some don't. I don't think this is like asking for the customer's email which they'd expect, selecting my card type is only present on ~50% of places I check out. (purely observational, no evidence to back that up) My point being that since entering your card type is not an expected piece of data every customer expects to put in for every transaction, they won't miss it to the point that they think your site is untrustworthy when it's not there. You have just made their life a little easier behind the scenes by not requiring them to supply it manually.

dminor · on Feb 23, 2010

Of course, an A/B test would tell us definitively which is the better option, but I suspect you are correct.

We have the field, but set it based on the credit card number on the back-end.

joezydeco · on Feb 23, 2010

Some BBSes from 1984 are calling and want their G-Files back.