why do websites, where you buy stuff, still need that “don’t use the browser back button to click away when you are making a purchase”. Have we not got a better solution?
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Placing an online order is kind of like playing a game of Telephone. You tell the website you want to place an order. The website tells their credit card processor, who looks at your card and says, “Oh, that’s a Visa” and contacts Visa. And the Visa responds in the affirmative to the credit card processor, who passes that info to the website. The website creates your order and communicates that to you.
You can imagine the kind of crossed signals that could happen if you start interrupting the Telephone process.
What if the credit card processor gets halfway through telling Visa to charge your card and then goes, “Wait, stop, take that back.” Did Visa finish charging your card or not?
What if the whole transaction is finished and the message is just about to get back to you that your order has been placed, but then you try to tell everyone to cancel, you changed your mind?
What if halfway through you try to send the transaction again and the messages meet in the middle; will you get charged twice?
Modern systems have different types of checks and balances in place, but it’s a complicated process, and it helps if you make the process as simple as possible by not sending mixed signals.
And there’s no guarantee that the website has been updated in the past 20 years. Imagine if you are the credit card processor, trying to communicate with websites built between 1995 – 2023. I’m not sure how frequently Visa, MasterCard, etc. update their systems either. So you’ve got a whole bunch of different dialects of different languages in play, and everybody needs to do their part by speaking slowly and clearly and making sure they get the all-clear before proceeding.
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