Technical issue surrounding asking for credit card BEFORE address?

Question

I'm considering asking for credit card details BEFORE an address for a physical product with average purchase price between $10-$50

What might be the technical (or non technical) issues surrounding doing this?

What comes to mind is :

• This seems a little non-standard from the users perspective
• We cant do address verification if we find we're having issues with fraud (not an issue so far)
• Users may be more likely to complete the sale since they've committed to their most important piece of information first
• By asking for zipcode we can populate city/state when we do ask for the address

Are there any dealbreakers i'm missing or things I'm not considering?

I'm trying to make the system as flexible as possible, but would prefer to getit right first time without barking up the wrong tree.

Answer 1

My advice to you is don't do it.

I often cancelled buy attempts and abandoned the sites when I got asked for my credit card number right in the face.

Often, the site is so poorly designed with no answers to obvious questions that you have to go through the complete form hoping to find answer in the process. Do they offer this particular shipment option? How much does this cost? Do they send to a package station or only to my home address? Do they provide an extra line for an address for me to use the "c/o" technique? I often could not find answers to these question anywhere on the site. So I either found them in the form before entering my payment details, in very few cases I did call them, in most others I just chose other places to buy from.

One more use case. In many places I've seen they only show you if they have an item on stock on the very last page of the order form. Not many people would want to "commit" to the payment right away without getting all the required information. You enter your credit card number, then on the second page you see they don't offer the shipment option you need, on the last page it says "the item is currently out of stock - delivery awaited in 3-4 weeks". And the order is already placed. Then it is a commitment from the user but not from the company, many will react emotionally to this approach as to scam and request their money back immediately.

The important thing is to behave friendly to your customers, don't scare them away, don't raise suspicions in them, don't make them regret they committed to their buying. Make them feel relaxed and happy and never with their arms bound.

Answer 2

This may seem non-standard from a consumer perspective, but this is perfectly normal in B2B systems. You can collect personal/company & payment details, then shipping & payment addresses, and then present the user with a final confirmation screen showing tax & delivery charges before processing the order. Only then do you process the credit card payment.

However, the issue that "New in town" mentions is a very valid one, where the customer is left thinking:

Hang on, why are you asking for my credit card details when I haven't seen the final amount yet?

I think this is perhaps down to a site not having a clearly defined order creation process (or at least one that is not clearly communicated to the customer), so that the customer is under the impression that by entering their CC details at that point, the payment will be processed there and then.

It may be best to do things the way other popular online stores do, Principle of Least Astonishment and all that, but if you really want to do it in this order then perhaps a simple progress bar to indicate order creation flow would help allay customer fears. Don't bet on it though, online consumers are rightly paranoid when it comes to their credit card details these days. ;)

Answer 3

As someone who has done quite a bit of online purchases, I can say that I would be extremely worried if a site first asks for my creditcard information before it asks for anything else. It tends to trigger my "Fraud Detector". Am not sure why this is, but I just get worried that the site is going to forget about asking for my address.

As mentioned, in B2B environments, this is a bit more common, though. Then again, in many B2B environments, the visitor first creates a business account before he even starts ordering. Part of setting up this business account is providing the creditcard information. To be honest, many B2B also provide services and digital downloads which don't even need a shipping address.

Answer 4

Many people use the ship to address page to determine if the site will ship to their region/country. They are not likely to bother giving CC info before they even know you'll ship to them.

I live in outside the US and MOST sites fail to recognize that there are customers outside of the US. Often the only way to determine if they will ship to me is to go through the order process to find out they have a finite list of "states" they will ship to and no "country" drop down.