Wp-calypso: Checkout: when a transaction is declined it should be obvious

[gibrown]

Currently when a transaction is declined during checkout we just show a standard error message in the upper right of the page.

It is tough to read and feels very weird.

We should have a cleaner error message when something like a credit card gets declined.

Saw this happen when demoing Jetpack Search Product purchase to MM.

[sirbrillig]

Do you recall if this was "old" checkout or "new" checkout? (Was it two columns or one?)

Also do you recall what the error message was? Some error messages we get back from Stripe (which Stripe gets from the banks) are intentionally vague like "your transaction was declined", and we don't have a lot of options around that. Other times we get useful messages like "your expiration date is invalid", and we typically pass whatever the error message is on to the user. Still, there might be something more we could do about a specific error message if you remember what it was.

[sirbrillig]

Saw this happen when demoing Jetpack Search Product purchase to MM.

Actually, this means it was probably "old" checkout, since new checkout shouldn't show up for Jetpack yet. Still, they both use Stripe so the error message in theory would be the same.

[gibrown]

Ya it was old checkout. It showed in the red popup in the upper right corner. I think it was a generic declined message.

[sirbrillig]

In that case it was probably directly from Stripe/the banks. Just like the experience at a restaurant or shop, they rarely tell you _why_ a card was declined; I don't think we can get any more detail about these messages. 😞

[DavidRothstein]

We can probably do a fair amount more to show users helpful info about the decline reasons though, at least in some cases (displaying what's recommended at https://stripe.com/docs/declines/codes would be a good start).

We do have something filed in the payments backlog to look into that: c/JpK0C3SU-tr