Wilbur Corncob's Blog April Archive

Punish the Customer

A theme of 'punish your customers' seems to abound. Technology should make any process more simple. However, if you look at many shopping carts, they state, "do not enter any spaces, dashes or non numeric characters in your credit card number", or similar jibberish. Now, if you look at your credit card (except Amex) you find that it is printed as 4 sets of 4 numbers, not one 16 digit number. What do these shopping carts expect of you? To enter one 16 digit number. Now, the ease of entering 4 sets of 4 numbers is much simpler and less error prone than one 16 digit number, especially when the point size is also set artificially small. Now, any shopping cart I have had my fingers in allows you to enter dashes, spaces or other characters for readablity. One bit of perl easily removes the spaces and dashes, for example: $cardnumber=~s/ //g; $cardnumber=~s/-//g; That would purify the card number of any customer entered spaces and dashes. Now, it would seem the programming effort for making the ordering process easier for the customer is skipped on the theory that the customer should always be punished.