If you want someone to give you their money, you better treat them well… So why is so many online businesses speaking to their customers like they were doing something stupid?

It’s the same thing you see over and over again – and even though I love and use a variety of open source software, I have to say that larger open source E-commerce initiatives does a terrible job at handling user input gracefully.

I’ve been there myself, as a developer, I tend to write unfriendly error messages from time to time. I realized years ago that it was time to sharpen up my skills and focus more on the user. After all, that’s what matters the most.

Some time ago, I read an excellent blog post over at Get Elastic called “Losing Customers At The Register: 12 Checkout Blunders” about how e-tailers lose revenue on their site. First point on the list you’ll see unfriendly credit card errors!

I was working with one of our pilot customers, The Wall Company, and did some research looking into their data to see that credit card errors occurred a few times a week.

We changed their error messages from the nasty “Something went wrong, please try again”, to this:

That alone, helped 49 of 126 credit card error turn into success. Data from the past 3 months shows us that 10% of all completed orders have at least one credit card error!