December 15, 2007 at 7:53 am
Anybody have any statistics on success / failure rates for online commerce?
My customer is a trade association with 14,000 members that offers online payment for their annual dues. This is a 3rd party Web app that uses MSSQL 2005.
So far, about 700 members have paid online for 2008, but it appears that there have been about 100 unsuccessful transactions - the app pulled a "receipt number" but there is no "payment ID" indicating that a payment was accepted.
Some member payment go straight in, but in one case it took 8 attempts; a few never did complete.
Could there be that many people with bad credit cards?
December 16, 2007 at 9:49 am
No idea of failure rates, but you should be able to contact your bank for statistics on your current situation.
December 16, 2007 at 4:47 pm
Steve, thanks for the quick reply.
I did some more digging, and the answer is: human error. I suppose I give people more credit than they deserve (no pun intended).
One member made 7 attempts: 1st time, didn't enter all 16 digits; 2nd time, used an expired card, but then clicked 3 more times thinking that it might go through (??); 6th time, entered a different card number but forgot to change the expired date; 7th time - success!
Does this sort of thing go on all the time on ecommerce sites? Yikes.
December 16, 2007 at 5:15 pm
We've seen some of that here in the past with invalid cards. However it's typically been 2-3 attempts only.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was regularly occurring as people always think they've typed in the correct card number. It's not an intuitive number to remember, so it's easy to look at it and think you've done it correctly.
December 17, 2007 at 4:44 am
From 10years of e-commerce experience I'd have a failure rate of approx 1-in-7 with people filling in forms wrongly, but with better input form design you can vastly improve this.
You need to implement better error checking on the input form - not filling in the full 16 digits of the CC number and/or the expiry date/check-digit are all simple things that can be tested/controlled BEFORE you submit a payment form to the bank.
You still won't be able to fix people who key in the wrong details ie CC number paired with the wrong expiry-date....but at least you can cut out some of the more stupid errors.
December 17, 2007 at 8:19 am
Thank you Andrew, that is exactly the kind of data I was looking for.
Bill
December 18, 2007 at 3:34 am
And in my case my userbase are meant to be somewhat educated, in that they are all internal to my organisation and they should be very familiar with payment requirements (given we are a bank)...Despite this we still get errors 🙂 but it can come down to 1-in-50/60 with good form layout + design, including validation of the input on pressing submit.
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