[Symbiote]

I was frustrated recently trying to book an expensive flight. My card was denied, and I retried several times — had I mistyped something? Should I have written "oe" not "ø" in "København"? Did it need me to make up a "state/province"?

Eventually I gave up with that site, and tried the same booking on a different website. It immediately said "Your bank has declined the transaction. Either you have insufficient funds in your account, or the transaction is above the bank's limit for this card." Annoying, but checking on the bank's website revealed there was an unspecified limit. The first site would have got the sale (with a different card) if they'd given me a clear error message.

[edpichler]

The generic error message is, sometimes, a strategy to hinder attacks, at the very cost of the user experience.

[Nars088]

I think there is a strong relationship between the average ticket size and payment experience. It is almost like it is the user's problem if the ticket size is high (hence the website need not necessarily invest in creating a good payment experience). Something like insurance websites.

The ones that really seem to think about the payment experience are the ones that have low to medium average ticket size and high transaction volumes. It is in the website's best interest to ensure each and every transaction goes through

[mythhabit]

It may be the limit imposed by VISA/MasterCard to comply with fraud regulations. You can have the limit lifted if you call your bank, but you will be on the hook for any fraud that may occur in the next 30 days until the limit resets again. Good news though, they have changed the rolling window to 7 days now.

[themoonisachees]

The comment wasn't about the card being declined, it was about how the website just said "failed" instead of saying "you're broke". Gp says if the website had informed him the card was the problem, the first website would have gotten the sale instead of the more verbose second one.

[mythhabit]

As much was clear. My comment was a possible explanation of what might have been the root cause. It was a interesting potentially relevant piece of information.

[eastbayjake]

This is typically an issue with the payment gateway and/or processor rather than the site or the platform underneath it. You probably had a better error message in the second experience because the site uses a different payment gateway/processor. That's not to say the first site's experience is great, but payment processor selection has lots of competing considerations... processing fees, ability to support enterprise-grade MSA/SLA requirements, security, audit trail, etc etc. (Others are also correct in observing that more vague error messages are actually a strategy by some processors to avoid tipping off fraudsters.)

[bryanrasmussen]

I'm guessing you have never worked in e-commerce and thus you think that the various problems, especially where credit card transactions occur, could be easily solved if the people implementing the site weren't just so darn stupid?

I also figure you haven't worked in the field because otherwise you'd know the site isn't necessarily in charge of what error codes the card handler is giving.

Although of course the site will be in charge of turning the not necessarily perfectly documented codes and which may vary based on a great number of different factors into error messages.

Which may well be the case, or it may be that whatever third party handler they are using to take care of transactions does a bad job in returning this kind of error message.

Or it may be that there is heightened security about the site right when you are using it and it turns out that in some opaque process the site has no control over the credit card handler is now returning less informative messages for that site and it is the same handler on the site where it does give a good error back.

etc. etc.

[tobr]

Well, if the other site was able to provide an actionable error message, it must be possible. It might not be in the website’s direct control, but they are in control of which payment processor to use.

[bryanrasmussen]

that assumes that there is a clear ranking of payment processors and that the processor that is crap at one moment in time is crap at all moments in time and the processor that is good at one moment in time is good at all moments in time and that the momentary superiority of one payment processor is an absolute superiority that makes them the obvious choice and anyone not making that choice is bad.

Which is, admittedly, a very HN assumption to make on basically any subject that comes up.

[pif]

> Which is, admittedly, a very HN assumption to make

No, it's your assumption that is wrong! You gave an explanation of several possible reasons, and you assume that people care. Actually, they don't!

The first site worked crappy and the second worked nice: the first site missed the money and the second one got it!

[bryanrasmussen]

No, my assumption was that the original poster hadn't ever worked e-commerce or they wouldn't have complained in a way that they thought it was inevitably due to factors within the sites' control that one worked nice and one worked crappy on this particular factor.

[ryandrake]

To an end customer, it doesn't matter if a problem is under the merchant's direct control or if it's happening upstream. He is the merchant's customer, the UX he sees is how the merchant is choosing to represent itself to their customers, and therefore the merchant, and only the merchant is accountable if that experience is crappy.

Whether OP actually worked in e-commerce is kind of irrelevant. I've never worked in e-commerce either, and if CompanyX fails to process my payment and I can't buy something from them, I'm going to rightfully blame CompanyX for that, not one of their service vendors.

[tobr]

I think maybe you are overreacting. No one is saying they’re bad or stupid. It is understandably difficult to get right when they probably have very limited insight into why some people might abandon a payment.

But in the end, the effect is that they lost a sale to a competitor who got it right this time.

[earth-adventure]

It's all to stop bad actors.

[red-iron-pine]

Yeah that's basically it. Risk vs. reward, and there is probably a way to make it work, but what's the payoff?

That said, a bikeshare should be able to help tourists / be low-effort. Otherwise I'll just uber.