Reduce Friction in Collecting Card Info #15
Description
Currently, there are 3 main ways to collect card information in the mobile context:
- Card Reader (Square)
- Type it in
- Visually scan the card (card.io)
Card readers are hard, because no one has one. Square is very nice in sending them out for free, but if I'm an app developer, the hardware portion of distributing card scanners is way too much work. I'm not building it.
Typing it in is hard. There's a lot of characters, and a lot of different fields you need to fill in. This seems like a lot of friction, and a very large spot to lose users.
Visually scanning the card with something like card.io is a great idea, but completely flops in practice. I created a test app with card.io ( and tried out some apps that use it ), and it actually took me just as long to get the card to scan as it does to type it in. And then I still had to type in the expiration date, name, and CVC.
This isn't actually an issue with balanced, or with the balanced-ios library, but it is an issue for me as I consider making apps that would leverage balanced. I've probably gone through 3 app ideas in the last month that would have used balanced, and gave up on them because I decided there was too much friction in entering card info. Just a thought, and it seems like balanced is someone who would be interested in this.