If you buy stuff online, you may have seen this “Verified by Visa” thing which is a big pain in the ass, completely useless and badly designed.
According to Visa it’s for better protection of online payments and increasing customer confidence… Usual marketing bullshit.
The first time I used it I had to create a kind of account with a small password and set my “forgot password” answer. The way it’s done I have no way to tell my browser to remember the password. And the session timeout is very short, so I had to do the process twice because my session expired.
The second time I bought something on a website using “Verified by Visa”, I already forgot my password and my browser was not able to help me on that… so I had to retrieve my password using the “Forgot password” feature. This mean I had to answer the question: “What’s your mother’s maiden name?”. Has you can see, it’s an highly secure question… So mostly anybody from my family (which I may not be in good relation with) or people how knows me (or know how to use Google) are able to retrieve my password too…
The third time, I had to enter some of my bank account details and enter the code I received by phone… Yes, “Verified by Visa” has a lot of different ways to check your identity. There are two problems here. Each time you are going to buy something, you may have a different thing to do, and I really don’t like that as a user. It’s so confusing that I even forgot to check that I was on a SSL connection… The other problem is that it does not work. I enter my phone number, click next, I have to enter the code I received on my phone… wait! I haven’t received anything. Why? I did not entered my phone number in the right format and the website did not bother telling me. You have to look on the “help” page to see that an international phone number is: “00″ + country code + phone number, not “+” + country code + phone number. Technically, as far as I remember, the real phone number (MSISDN) is: country code + phone number (without “00″ or “+”). Anyway, why are they stupid enough to not support the different formats or at least warn when you are using the wrong one? So again I had to try again… but in the mean time my session expired…
In conclusion:
- better security: is that a joke?
- better customer confidence: next time I buy something online and I’m redirected to the “Verified by Visa” site, I will cancel my payment and buy somewhere else.
- better user experience (OK, it’s not one of Visa’s goal): please shoot yourself a bullet in the head, thank you.
We are in 2010, how is it possible that companies provide so badly thought services? (well… not thought at all I guess) I don’t mind if they provide sucking services, but I really mind when I have no other choice than using them. I’m sure they spent millions in it and the only thing I want them to do is to shut it down so we can go back to the way it was before. I agree if they want to increase security, but they have first to find out one of the right ways to do it.
If you have an online shop, please don’t use the “Verified by Visa” option or cancel it if you did.