Increase Revenue with Friendly Credit Card Errors | Hacker News Reader

Increase Revenue with Friendly Credit Card Errors

blog.milkshakeshop.com

10 pointsmartinnormark10 comments

Personal anecdote: I was booking a room with Delta Hotels recently, and it declined my card repeated saying that my expiry date was wrong (it wasn't).

At some point I figured that my booking date was after the expiry date, which makes some sense that they would not accept it. Clearly they had the code logic to check for this, but they couldn't get the error message to tell me this?

Instead they threw me the old "your expiry date is invalid!" message.

I don't get how so many otherwise smart startups neglect to have a big fat link to their company website on their blog.

Yes, especially with a logo and tagline at the top.

I am totally embarrassed right now. What a stupid thing to forget. Thanks for the heads up...

A good tip to improve around the margins, but fixing your main product/service needs to come first before you devote time to details like this. This tip will increase your revenue 5% once; an improved product might increase it 5% per month.

In other words: prioritize.

This seems like a great thing to prioritize. It's easy and it affects people who have already decided to pay. It seems ridiculous to lose a customer who wants to give you money. The return on investment is probably far greater than usability fixes earlier in the customer acquisition pipeline.

I agree. Never ever lose customers who are trying to throw money at you. Not only will you lose that one sale where they get the errors, they'll probably never return.

All I saw initially was the red input box. I initially skipped completely over the error message, thinking it was an ad. Only after being thoroughly confused for a minute did I notice it.

Good point, but this is something that would appear either on a refresh or with a little Ajax, which would make it stand out to people using it.

I see what you mean. Good point.

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