Your opinion isn't any more justified. There is a strong case for having the selection be there. You'd be surprised what happens to the average user when you removes the credit card selection field, especially when you can't accept every single credit card out there. I've actually spent time with this.
If you really want to make a case for removing it, demonstrate with actual numbers how it will make the company more money.
As I mentioned in another reply, you have to have a client willing to pay for it.
My opinion is backed up with experience that problems end up being caused by people choosing "mastercard" but entering a visa number (for example). It's more errors that have to be dealt with, and causes confusion and in an earlier project, abandoned carts, or increase in phone calls to 800 numbers to talk to someone to place an order.
Can I say it was specifically that? No, but I did see higher than anticipated abandonment rates after wrong CC numbers/types were chosen.
But... hey... "that's not our site" and "our users are different". So... unless a client wants to pay for A/B testing (and wait for a statistically useful number of users to use both versions), they just go with whatever they want. And they'll rarely want to spend more money to prove themselves wrong.
"My opinion is backed up with experience that problems end up being caused by people choosing "mastercard" but entering a visa number (for example)."
I can back this up and I am pretty far way from being ignorant on this matters. The problem is that some on-the-fly internet credit card generators (like MBnet in Europe) can give you a credit card number without saying if it's a Visa or a Mastercard. It gets worse because they actually generate both types of card numbers. So whenever I am presented with one of those fields to choose a card I error 50% of the time. Annoying.
It's not enough for me to quit buying something but if you have also Visa Electron, Visa Debit and Visa Credit then I surely won't buy it, I would have to try so many combinations while filling parts of the form each time (because it won't keep the ccv, for example).
Now that you say it, maybe there is no difference between selecting one or the other? Well, there's at least one difference, some sites add a certain amount if you pay by credit card, right?
Your experience and what you were discussing are two issues entirely. Equating the two is a misunderstanding of the problem. Presenting a list of cards and throwing errors based on the select list are two things.
> I did see higher than anticipated abandonment rates after wrong CC numbers/types were chosen.
No. You didn't. What you saw was a higher than anticipated rate of abandonment after a user was presented with an error or told they'd entered an invalid number.
> So... unless a client wants to pay for A/B testing
That's true. But even still, you opinion is still heavily biased.
As someone mentioned, presenting the options via some mechanism (whether that be a select, or a list of images or something like it) doesn't necessitate throwing an error. PayPal, has mentioned, handles this gracefully.
> You'd be surprised what happens to the average user when you removes the credit card selection field, especially when you can't accept every single credit card out there.
PayPal handles this gracefully. There are icons of the (four?) types of CC they accept above the field. As you type, the ones ruled out by the first couple digits lose opacity and the card type you've entered remains displayed.
Your opinion isn't any more justified. There is a strong case for having the selection be there. You'd be surprised what happens to the average user when you removes the credit card selection field, especially when you can't accept every single credit card out there. I've actually spent time with this.
If you really want to make a case for removing it, demonstrate with actual numbers how it will make the company more money.