Creditcard.js: a more usable credit card form
creditcardjs.com
creditcardjs.com
really? you're gonna do jQuery (+ all validation plugins) bashing for what? 5 fields + a luhn algo? please, take your snake oil elsewhere.
"the heavily tested JavaScript framework"? you must not follow jQuery's own pedantic development and testing, i would argue it is more heavily tested than Google's we-only-support-latest-2-versions-of-any-browser libs.
if anyone needs to do client-side cc pre-checks, there's a pretty up-to-date regex list [1] and a luhn implementation [2] which will get you 99.9% there. if you feel that the 0.1% (but probably much less) is worth a monthly licensing fee, you now have options :)
[1] https://github.com/Shopify/active_merchant/blob/master/lib/a...
However, it's pretty much all covered by Stripe's open source jQuery.payment, which is also agnostic to your payment gateway.
https://github.com/stripe/jquery.payment
(Disclaimer - I built it.)
Personally, I would much rather use the MIT-licensed jQuery.payment by Stripe. I think $300 or even $149 is prohibitively expensive, and would prefer a script that is actively used and reviewed in public by many developers.
Thanks Alex!
Surely if you're a business of any merit – making even $500/month – $300 for a javascript library that'll remove bumps in the checkout process is worth it?
I fail to see why this cannot co-exist alongside the Stripe alternative library. Heck, just taking the stripe library and offering commercial grade support, and charging $300 seems like a pretty good business.
It certainly can, anyone is more than welcome to pay for something done by open source software available for free.
>Surely if you're a business of any merit
Just because you're a business doesn't mean you should pay for things that you can do cheaper.
The point is that a decent web developer could recreate that form in 20 minutes with jquery.payment and a little bit of CSS, so why should you pay $300 for the same thing?
But I don't want to spend time figuring out what I want and putting it together. I also don't want to spend $150/year on it though. :)
If you built a higher-level abstraction on top of jQuery.payment, that made the good design choices for the developer, so the developer could just 'insert form here'....
- It is possible for the security code and card number fields to be green, indicating they have been filled out correctly, using a 3-digit security code for an American Express card number or a 4-digit security code for any other card number.
- The security code help probably should not display the American Express case when no card type has been identified.
- The security code field should display 4 dots when American Express is detected.
- The card type detection is so faint as to be invisible to inattentive users or people with awful displays.
- Drop-down for expiration is a disaster and a huge regression from the status quo.
I played with the checkout form some and discovered these additional issues:
- Email validation is wrong, valid emails are flagged as incorrect.
- At almost all reasonable browser widths, the right 2/5 or so of the security code tip is cut off, rendering it useless.
- After clicking "Purchase License" without completely filling out the form, the button permanently changes to "Please Correct Errors Above." Correcting the errors will not allow you to actually purchase a license. You will need to refresh and enter all your data again.
- You can actually successfully submit the form using a Visa with a 4-digit security code or an American Express with a 3-digit security code. It was declined :(
- "The 'exp_month' parameter should be an integer (instead, is MM)." is not a very usable way of phrasing this error.
I would not buy $149 closed-source beta software for making my purchase form more usable from people with such an unusable purchase form.
Click on security code question mark, then change type of the card - two "cards" appear for a second on the right than the old one disappears.
- only minified source provided
- not out of the box compatible with a module loader
- no public bug tracker
- doesn't handle all edge cases (for example, type some numbers, place the cursor after the space, and hit backspace).
Good luck.
On the other hand, this is a nice list of edge cases for someone to check when they implement the open source weekend project version of this.
[1] http://kenkeiter.com/skeuocard/
Edit: here's the original post - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6143604
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6143829
I still stand by what I said:
"That fancy CC form will not sell a single thing. It will however stop people from paying."
But it doesn't look like you provide an uncompressed version for review. I can't use a third party library that deals with credit cards without first reviewing the code.
It's a brilliant idea for a project and we all should be absolutely kicking ourselves for not having done it years ago. Do you know how many tens of thousands of dollars of dev time I've seen thrown at this, across a dozen companies operating in waste-causing parallel, to produce something less usable and less likely to increase sales across the company? Do you know how many hours of my life I've wasted on it myself? The mind boggles.
Bottom line, saving money vs. time isn't a good reason not to buy this.
I still wouldn't be surprised if someone goes and builds an FOSS version of this anyways. FOSS people have far more than just "a weekend" for things like this, and it actually looks like a fun thing to build. Also a buggy prototype could probably be whipped up in a weekend if you leverage a good JS framework like Angular or Ember. Perhaps not but I'm sure someone will try.
People have higher-expectations-than-are-warranted for "Some OSS developer (who is not me)" deciding to bite off a project on their behalf. The threat of this is routinely invoked to scare developers into not releasing software commercially. It's almost invariably overblown. Crikey, people told me 8 years ago that BCC was commercially non-viable because there existed OSS (with XML output for linking to an upcoming multimedia engine [+]) that was going to eat its lunch "as soon as it was marketed."
+ Seriously not making that up. http://sourceforge.net/projects/bingo-cards/
I guess the marketing of the JS library would make a real difference: aim for management rather than developers?
Good luck selling this.
EDIT: Also, if anyone needs help with jCCV, get in touch at @PawelDecowski.
Also, if your primary selling point is that you are "a more usable credit card form", you look weak without a clear statement of what you're more usable than and producing empirical data to show where you convert better. You're talking about a critical part of my payments system, so I'm hardly going to take your word for it just because you've got some red and green on your web site. This goes double for any sort of web form tool, because these are notorious for actually making things worse if they don't properly support all platforms, all the edge cases in the inputs, all accessibility aids, and so on.
Sorry to be so negative, because I'm sure a lot of hard work went into this, but taking card payments is not a game, and clearly this product is nothing like ready for production use. I worry for whoever is charging for this, because if someone did buy it and then wind up losing real money as a result of problems like the ones mentioned throughout this HN discussion, liability could be a real concern.
Surprised to see the 'one website' clause, as well -- as someone who spends a lot of time working with Stripe integrations, I'd love to buy this once and then plunk it down everywhere. Still, this is a cool effort and I hope to see it succeed!
He has a way better chance of selling 100 licenses for $300 each versus 3000 licenses for $10 each.
The smart move would be to actually do some amount of outbound sales to sell licenses. There a ton of random vendors out there doing $100k+/year that have broken credit card flows. Find their checkout page, save it do disk. Spend 10 minutes integrating this verification into their own form, and cold-email the webmaster with the zip'd up demo and already done integration. Let's say it takes 6 hours to 40 of those. If 10% to convert, you're making serious money.
It's definitely not a bad idea to do outbound marketing for this. I just think conversions would be a lot higher if the readable source is also present in the offer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Issuer_Identification_N...
edit: which doesn't change your point that initial format could move around after you type the first digits. I'll leave this here for trivia.
However, if you are going to claim that it has 'Accurate Card Type Detection', you need to make sure that you cover common cases.
E.g. I live in NY and my Amex starts with 3723 and the input form doesn't recognize it.
As a developer, I understand that there are bugs in software. But if you are selling me a component which can not handle my own card, I would really wonder how comprehensive your card type detection is. They link to this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Issuer_Identification_N... which lists 37 as a valid Amex number. I think they need to go through their code and make sure all those numbers are handled correctly.
1. No free trial, dropping $300 on a javascript plugin that I don't even know works yet is a lot of money.
2. I don't know if the value it offers is THAT much different from other credit card validation tools. If I'm making $50/hr freelancing, that's 6 hours of my time and I could easily customise some other alternative to fit my needs in that time.
I can't stand credit card forms that split the credit card number into 4 inputs ("[XXXX] [XXXX] [XXXX] [XXXX]") because I can't paste my number in (the first box has a maxlength of 4 usually)
Yet, for people who are typing in the number (vs pasting it), the 4 sections makes it easier.
This form is the best of both worlds.
The first digit in the second block shows up correctly, but then the cursor is positioned before the first digit/second block, so that the remainder of the block gets inserted in front of the first digit, completely messing up the card number.
Some helpful pointers and a nice example. Open source it and that's that. But $149?
If it requires JS, then it isn't compatible with any payment form.
But if you restrict the form to just numbers, I can't type in my text to expand to the full number. I always get super annoyed at credit card forms that do this.
/two cents
Personally, I also hate dropdowns for expiration. Isn't it far easier to just type in what's on the card and validate that as a valid date?
But surprisingly handles JCB and Diners Club.
Very high price point, developers who can afford to buy it can likely code it themselves.
i start typing in a known prefix for master card
514101
and after i type the `0` the cursor (for who knows what reason) jumps to before the 0 and i end up with
5141 10
(note the 0 and 1 swapped)
works fine in firefox; breaks in chromium
Seriously though, what makes you think people have to "scroll" through 11 months to get to December? 12 options can be comfortably displayed all at once on screen. Have you ever seen a dropdown?
Who pays to beta test software ?