[aresant]

If a user used Stripe "the chance that a visitor would abandon their donation at the Checkout step halved from 22% to 10%"

You can see even in Stripe's earliest UX the desire to dramatically limit the "pain" that goes into entering CC details online.

When they added the "remember me" button I said to myself this is going to wind up being the "billion dollar checkbox" once merchants really understand the power of not forcing people to re-enter their CC details.

It's still somewhat mind-boggling to me how badly browser "auto-fill" solutions fail at this incredibly valuable problem.

Amazon and Apple, IMO, basically hold onto their dominating positions in physical & digital content respectively because their hold so many CC's and it's just so much damn easier to not have to re-authorize, re-input, etc etc.

[swartkrans]

When I see that "remember me" checkbox I thought about how they were storing that information. There's usually no obvious indicator someone is using stripe, you just see a form asking for credit card input. I tend to never check such a box and in fact prefer it if there's a payment option with a company that already has my credit card info, like paypal or amazon, so that I have less surface area for having that information stolen and less places to update once I have to renew or replace a card.

[maerF0x0]

I too do not like my CC info on file. This is mostly so I can always be super sure that I'm paying for something. There cannot be any accidental clicks that lead to charges, instead I can know, for certain, that If I havent put in my CC then I'm not paying.

[funkyy]

Your CC is probably insured anyways and if you have good bank they will deal with any fraud in matter of days releasing you from any responsibility.

If not - change a bank.

[swartkrans]

Yeah that is true but I could just not expose my credit cards and not worry about catching fraud in time to avoid having to deal with problems. These days you have to read your credit card report carefully to see if you've been victimized. I didn't realize I was until I saw a $29.99 charge every month for someone else's credit report. I didn't think it was a mistake until I canceled mine and still saw that charge there months later. It's not enough to be covered by your bank, at least not for me.

[SteveArmstrong]

I know I'm not financially liable, but when the bank has to cancel and reissue my card (with a new number), it's still annoying to have to go and switch it everywhere. Smaller surface area (so less places to change) helps with that pain too.

[rogerbinns]

Do you live in the US and used several retailers in the last few years? If so you'll find that the banks solve the various credit card breaches by issuing new cards (new card numbers and expiry dates). Then you have to go everywhere you have the card stored online and change them. By the fourth time you end up doing this you get real annoyed.

[isamuel]

I've found Safari's credit card auto-fill to be remarkably good. To a first approximation, I never type my credit card information anymore—and when I do, I'm willing to blame the website designer for doing some goofy thing to prevent recognition.

[Silhouette]

If a user used Stripe "the chance that a visitor would abandon their donation at the Checkout step halved from 22% to 10%"

While that's an interesting data point, plausible explanations could be anything from very positive, such as

(a) Stripe's Checkout process being dramatically more effective for signed-in users, for example because of the reduced effort required to complete the transaction

to very negative, such as

(b) Stripe's Checkout process causing a horrible drop in conversions for users who aren't signed in, for example because of the added complexity that comes from their "remember me" mechanism or the unfamiliar branding.

It doesn't seem at all surprising that previous Stripe users would convert better with either of these relatively extreme explanations -- either those people had an easier interface to use, or they were necessarily already familiar with the Stripe brand.

[avibryant]

I take your point that there are a number of possible explanations (at varying levels of plausibility) for this effect, but to address a specific example you mention: whenever we change something significant in Checkout like adding the "remember me" option, we A/B test it, and if it did in fact cause a "horrible drop in conversions" we would absolutely not release it. (It doesn't).

[Silhouette]

whenever we change something significant in Checkout like adding the "remember me" option, we A/B test it, and if it did in fact cause a "horrible drop in conversions" we would absolutely not release it. (It doesn't).

With the greatest respect, while that may be true on balance over the entire population of Stripe-using businesses, it won't necessarily be true for all of them individually.

(I have inside knowledge of various businesses, at least one of which did switch from Checkout to Stripe.js for the kinds of reasons I mentioned before. However, I have no idea how well or otherwise any mostly small and UK-based companies I know about might represent your customer base as a whole, so I didn't want to be unfairly critical.)