This is a quicky post but I know that a lot of people have experienced this issue.
Your browsing the web. You find something you want to buy. You go through the checkout process. On the payment page you type the first number of your credit card and a little drop down appears with your entire credit card number.
What’s your first thought? Do you ignore it? Do you go oh crap how’d that happen?
I know when I’m browsing I don’t want my credit card number stored in the browser that I’m visiting strange websites with. Just doesn’t sound safe at all to me, especially since that AutoComplete feature doesn’t encrypt anything.
AutoComplete is great and all, but not for credit card numbers. I’ll type that myself thank you very much.
So how can we prevent this from happening? Well as a visitor all we can do is delete that Credit Card data, and possibly even turn off AutoComplete so it doesn’t happen again. Although I do like the AutoComplete feature for other fields.
But as a Merchant it should be our responsibility to make sure we prevent that Credit Card data from going into the AutoComplete if possible. It is our responsibility since we are the ones providing the form, and we are the ones asking for the information.
It’s the least we can do. And to be honest it’s a really simple thing to do.
On your Credit Card form just edit your Credit Card field and add the autocomplete=”off” field. This will keep that data for your visitors from being stored. For examples sake your field should look something like this:
<input type="text" name="card_number" autocomplete="off">
There we go all done.
You know I’m actually really shocked that shopping cart software such as X-Cart does NOT automatically include turning off AutoComplete. You actually have to do this yourself.
I guess it’s just that programmers don’t always think of things like that. If you are looking to do this in X-Cart yourself, you’ll need to edit the template:
/skin1/main/register_ccinfo.tpl
And if you need help figuring out exactly how to get it situated drop me an email, I’d be happy to help you out and answer any other questions you might have.
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