I’m looking for a bit of help or shared experiences that might improve customers’ perception of the Square Online Store which we started using a few weeks ago. We have been puzzled by the lack of orders after customers have asked how to order online.
We asked one customer who managed it what his experience was and he said the ordering was fine but the checkout took multiple attempts due to field entries being flagged as “not valid” even when they are. We have done some research on this and the problems seem to occur on mobile devices (phones) which is what most people would use to order from our little café in the UK.
Problems encountered include:
- On the “Your Details” form all that can be seen in the phone number prefix field is the word ‘United’. Although I guess this should default to United Kingdom, rather than United Arab Emirates, one customer had his phone reported as not valid when the prefix was set to United States and he got very irate.
- On the “Payment Information” form this behavior is repeated. The country abbreviations should be USA, UAE or UK so that there is less ambiguity on small screens
- The Postal Code field parsing is pathetic. Another user had a perfectly correct postcode which was repeatedly rejected. It turned out she had a space following the code. Detecting this was also difficult because the code could not all be displayed on the phone screen due to the large-ish font she was using. Not satisfactory and the parser should be able to strip out preceding or following blank space
- A further comment was “why do I have to enter my phone number and postcode twice?”. The truth is that you don’t. At least in the UK, credit card validation only needs the postcode once, the numeric part of the address and the card holders name (along with the actual card data, of course) and yet the form asks for City, State, Country and phone number as well. All this is making users highly irritated especially when combined with the next problem.
- I have a screenshot of a form correctly completed with card number, expiry date, CVV number and first postcode and yet each field is flagged as ‘not valid’. A complete fabrication. For obvious reasons I cannot post this here.
It seems to me that the form designers have not thought about how it renders on a small screen and have not studied any ergonomics. Why, oh why, for pickup orders is the whole billing address required. You don’t have to do that when ordering face to face and paying by contactless card.
The whole checkout process seems designed to annoy. Has anyone else had any similar experiences?
Thanks
