Creditcard.js: a more usable credit card form

by pnt • 13 years ago

184 108 13 years ago

Osiris• 13 years ago

Looks interesting. Is there an option to also display certain billing address fields? I use minFraud and it requires a country, state, city, and postal code for distance checks.

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?

nfoz2• 13 years ago

Creditcard.js avoids these design mistakes, providing an HTML/CSS/JS solution compatible with any payment form.

If it requires JS, then it isn't compatible with any payment form.

pnt• 13 years ago

When JS is not available, this becomes a regular HTML form with inputs and selects.

guido4000• 13 years ago

Does not support 1Password, though

nfoz2• 13 years ago

Ah, that's great. Thanks

srhngpr• 13 years ago

For a simpler, open-source alternative, check out Skeuocard [1], I believe it was posted on HN previously.

[1] http://kenkeiter.com/skeuocard/

Edit: here's the original post - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6143604

Navarr• 13 years ago

I really liked Skeuocard. Skeumorphic design is on the out, but when it resembles what you're looking at while you input it - it might still be beneficial.

jasonlotito• 13 years ago

Skeuocard still suffers from severe usability problems I outlined here:

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."

vonseel• 13 years ago

I liked Skeuocard, but all the hate has scared me away.

jmduke• 13 years ago

Interesting price point; it seems to be in a no-mans land where developers who can pay $300 would probably be in a position that they'd want to implement it themselves, yet it might be prohibitively expensive for smaller clients who'd better spend their efforts elsewhere and could use Skeuocard or Stripe.js for free.

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!

hemancuso2• 13 years ago

I think it is probably the right move.

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.

vbsteven• 13 years ago

If I was having a successful business that is doing $100k+/year I would think twice about integrating a new form with minified javascript from a cold email into my payment flow.

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.

thoughtpalette3• 13 years ago

$149 is a extremely high price-point for this with so many alternatives out there. I also don't see the value vs. the price. I've implemented http://jquerycreditcardvalidator.com/ with authorize.net with zero issues.

Good luck selling this.

pbreit2• 13 years ago

Demo doesn't show Amex but I presume it is supported?

thoughtpalette3• 13 years ago

If you're talking about jQuery Credit Card Validator, it supports Amex. https://github.com/PawelDecowski/jQuery-CreditCardValidator/...

csomar2• 13 years ago

It's $299 (that's the beta-price). But I don't think it's expensive. I think it's quite correct. If a developer value his time, he should probably buy it. That is if he finds that it has advantages over the free alternatives.

thoughtpalette3• 13 years ago

That's my point, there's not many advantages over an open source/free alternative (subjective). And it's contextual, there's no way I'm going to argue for my [insert superior here] at [insert agency, studio,etc here] to buy this when their tech savvy enough to seek other alternatives.

meowface• 13 years ago

It looks nice, but who would pay $300 for a single Javascript widget? Big companies might, sure, but there are plenty of good free implementations out there that have effectively the same features.

PawelDecowski• 13 years ago

Hey, I’m the developer of jQuery Credit Card Validator. Thanks for using it!

EDIT: Also, if anyone needs help with jCCV, get in touch at @PawelDecowski.

storborg• 13 years ago

- $149 per site

- 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.

colinbartlett• 13 years ago

I do not understand the value this provides.

Some helpful pointers and a nice example. Open source it and that's that. But $149?

joeblau• 13 years ago

So diligent. I didn't even notice that it cost ~$150 to use.

pbreit2• 13 years ago

Doesn't handle Amex correctly for card that begins 3725

wcfields• 13 years ago

or * Amex Corporate that start with 3787 * Australian Bank Cards

But surprisingly handles JCB and Diners Club.

dabernathy89• 13 years ago

It doesn't format my AMEX card correctly (uses the 4 separate 4 digit pieces).

alfl23• 13 years ago

You minified half of the Closure Library for a modest product. 50kb of inline JS for card processing, just to obfuscate. This is terrible, you need two libraries doing the same thing.

Very high price point, developers who can afford to buy it can likely code it themselves.

elmin• 13 years ago

I'm sorry but nothing here is worth money. It was a little silly when I thought it was an open-source project, as a paid product it is ridiculous.

mrjaeger• 13 years ago

I'd say that the ? for explaining the CCV should be a hover effect rather than a click. In every other CC form I've ever dealt with it's been a hover effect.

csomar2• 13 years ago

I have bad experience with the hover effect. Like showing up when I don't want it to show, and also it doesn't work quite well on tablets, phones and touch devices. I think the button is better approach.

maccman• 13 years ago

Looks good, and I like the mistakes and solutions section.

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.)

sgustard• 13 years ago

And you have a similar UI widget at

https://stripe.com/docs/checkout

kamjam2• 13 years ago

Lol, that looks exactly the same to me!

niel• 13 years ago

The presentation of Creditcard.js is great in terms of styling, and I'm sure the practical example goes a long way in selling something like this to non-developer decision makers. This is probably the market they are aiming for.

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!

cookiecaper• 13 years ago

Agreed. I wouldn't be opposed to paying $150 for a form that would take me a while to build, but there's already a lot of good open-source solutions for card inputs.

pclark• 13 years ago

"prohibitively expensive" ?

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.

Justsignedup• 13 years ago

Thinking price point, 300 is about a couple of hour's worth of work which they save your developers. Not a big deal.

Killswitch• 13 years ago

You guys at Stripe are amazing. I love you guys.

jrochkind1• 13 years ago

From the initial docs of jQuery.payment, it looks like a lower-level tool -- the OP provides the promise of "you just drop it in, and you get these things, designed for you." jQuery.payment looks like "Here's a toolset you can use to do whatever you want!"

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'....

ohazi• 13 years ago

Doesn't work under Chrome/Linux (older version 26.0.1410.63). The first group of digits in the card number field show up correctly, but then something goes wrong when the script tries to insert a space for formatting.

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.

rickdale• 13 years ago

My observation is that I wish the dots that are place holders in the box, turned into numbers as I typed them. When I went to type in a cc, the text box went blank, leaving me aesthetically with the same cc form as any one of them on the web.

skeoh• 13 years ago

One small consideration is that the American Express number format differs from other cards so the pattern of dots might change as you type.

isleyaardvark• 13 years ago

The format can be determined from the first one or two numbers entered in the field:

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.

righon4• 13 years ago

I'd make the expiration dates text fields. Having to scroll through a list of numbers in a drop-down is a pain.

kalleboo4• 13 years ago

What browser/OS doesn't let you type to select in dropdowns?

righon4• 13 years ago

Doesn't matter, that's a "power user" shortcut. You'd be surprised how many people do not think or know that can be done. Why not make it easier and just make the expiration date text fields? It's much easier to type in the month '12' than having to scroll scroll through 11 options to get to 12.

ryan-c• 13 years ago

Typing 4321432143214321 results in 4321 3214 2143 1234 in Chrome. Works right if I type spaces, but I shouldn't need to do that. Also, let me type the expiration date in if I want to - I hate it when I can't complete a form by tabbing through fields.

cstrat• 13 years ago

I had the same issue with the numbers entering incorrectly.

kalleboo4• 13 years ago

I don't know how your browser works, but for the date fields, I could tab to them, press space, type the digits, press enter, tab to the next one, rinse, repeat.

mratzloff• 13 years ago

Same in Safari 6.

geofft• 13 years ago

Yeah, I was going to say -- I can't even type a credit card number in correctly without the form mangling it (Safari 6 on OS X 10.8.4). All the fanciness in the world isn't worth anything if you can't _type in a credit card number_.

leeoniya• 13 years ago

"JavaScript libraries like jQuery aren't well equiped to handle form input, so Creditcard.js uses the more robust and comprehensive Google Closure Tools, the heavily tested JavaScript framework behind Gmail and Google Plus."

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...

[2] https://gist.github.com/ShirtlessKirk/2134376

mrchess• 13 years ago

To put the price in perspective, HighCharts, an extremely complex charting library, only charges $90 for a single website license.

kalleboo4• 13 years ago

Or the Invision Power Board Forums/CMS/Kitchen Sink software for $175

woah• 13 years ago

$150- do you also offer payment processing?

dkroy• 13 years ago

That would be a great thing to cross-sell!

umsm• 13 years ago

Technically, this is broken. 4-digit security codes exist, yet this form doesn't allow them.

criswell• 13 years ago

I thought that was only for American Express? It allowed me to enter 4 numbers with an American Express card number. There wasn't 4 little placeholder dots, which was confusing.

myang2• 13 years ago

Nice. Tested on mobile safari and it works fine. However it doesn't seem to recognize American Express card number?

myang2• 13 years ago

Found another issue: in Chrome (v26.0.1410.63), typed in 1234 1234 and the numbers got rearranged to 1234 2341

some1else• 13 years ago

There is a caret bug that messes up typing: http://cl.ly/image/0H3F1O030m2Q

coenhyde• 13 years ago

I was actually pretty keen on purchasing this. Today I'm building a payment page. I don't mind paying for something good that will save me time.

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.

glennos• 13 years ago

Thought the same as the above, but also have an issue with the design decision to use dots as placeholder text. Conventionally, dots indicate that text had already been entered into a (password) field. Even though they are slightly greyed, I think it's confusing.

rheotron• 13 years ago

Very cool looking, would love to use it, but there's two main problems:

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.

kalleboo4• 13 years ago

Doesn't support credit card autofill via Safari or 1Password plugin...

schrodinger• 13 years ago

Would love to hear an update in a month of how sales are going..

rootuid• 13 years ago

costs $ and is in beta. This looks like an ad.

Who pays to beta test software ?

petergreen• 13 years ago

The "?" should be skipped on tabbing: from "Security code" jump straight to "Name"

pud• 13 years ago

I love this form.

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.

codezero• 13 years ago

For months I prefer numbers ordered in a way that respond to digits as input. If I press 8, I don't jump to 8 in this list because it has 08. It's minor, but a peeve of mine :)

Phylodome• 13 years ago

Telling my my AmEx is invalid. Last time I checked it was a real CC...

knurdle• 13 years ago

When you type in an amex card number, shouldn't the security code change to show 4 dots? Seems like a simple oversight.

solutionyogi• 13 years ago

Great component and I would not mind paying for it.

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.

eof• 13 years ago

this literally doesn't work for me.

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

patio112• 13 years ago

I don't have immediate need for it, but I'd take the other side of the bet from all comments saying "That is too expensive. OSS will eat your lunch. I bet I could do it in a weekend."

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.

lucisferre• 13 years ago

We built some custom inputs just for handling number formatting (currency, percentages and separators) using AngularJS (directives) and I can say from experience it is much harder than anyone would imagine. The basic concepts are simple, it's always the implementation details, edge cases, browser quirks that will eat up your time.

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.

patio112• 13 years ago

OSS and credit cards have existed for every single day of the last ten years. Did the community just not notice that taking credit cards on websites is done by substantially every business transacting on the Internet? Or were they just hiding their well-tested well-designed decent-UX commercially-supported OSS options on localhost until someone tried to commercialize the niche, to now be unleashed on Github with great fanfare?

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/

alixaxel2• 13 years ago

Skeuocard (http://kenkeiter.com/skeuocard/) was on the top page of HN a couple of months ago.

anonymoushn2• 13 years ago

A mix of bugs and suggestions:

- 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.

xixixao• 13 years ago

Another bug:

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.

yalooze• 13 years ago

Great list. Can you elaborate on "Drop-down for expiration is a disaster and a huge regression from the status quo."? Are you saying the norm is to have it typed?

lancewiggs• 13 years ago

For me: yes, absolutely, it's much much faster and less painful to type the four numerics than to click on drop downs.

anonymoushn2• 13 years ago

Yes, I prefer to have it typed. Credit card forms vary a lot, but the ones that are shaped like credit cards have usually just have 2 text fields with a slash in between.

alixaxel2• 13 years ago

For such a high price, they could pay some more attention to their own buy license page: the security code help section is partially (mostly) hidden.

zrail• 13 years ago

The mistakes and solutions section is great info, thanks. That said, there's a bunch of problems with the actual implementation. I put together a payment form that converts very well for selling my book Mastering Modern Payments[1] and it's included with the middle package ($59 instead of $149). It uses jquery.payment from Stripe which several people mentioned earlier in the thread.

[1] https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments

Finbarr• 13 years ago

I think the tabindexes should be different. When I hit tab in the security code field, it currently focuses on the question mark. It would be better if it focused on the name field at that point IMO. Otherwise, very nice!

christiangenco• 13 years ago

Small complaint: I use Typinator[1] (a text expander for Mac) to type in my credit card numbers. I'll enter a simple string I wouldn't normally type, like "mvcd" (or "my visa card") and it expands to the full number.

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

Silhouette• 13 years ago

In addition to all the other criticism here, the EULA for this product is terrible. There are so many silly claims (not to mention typos that completely undermine much of it anyway) that I would walk away no matter how good the code on offer was.

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.

xerophtye• 13 years ago

I liked that other one better.

http://kenkeiter.com/skeuocard/

apathetic• 13 years ago

what... it's not.. opensource? peeks into javascript source code

zapt02• 13 years ago

Price is outrageous. Nobody is gonna buy this.

oe• 13 years ago

One trick to make the UI feel good and snappy is to make the animations fast. For example in this form the security question help fades in way too slow, making the whole form feel slow and brittle.

acido303• 13 years ago

You are trying to shell this for 149$ on HN? Seriously?

omeid2• 13 years ago

Related: http://kenkeiter.com/skeuocard/ I think I saw this on hackernews a while ago.

chromaton• 13 years ago

It would be helpful if it also supported China Unionpay cards (19 digits).

Creditcard.js: a more usable credit card form

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