As noted over on Khoi Vinh’s blog Subtraction, the basic credit web form has been improved. The great news is that PayPal did it. Why is the PayPal connection important? Because others will soon follow suit. It’s very possible that innovative eCommerce design is taking place at Jims-Shrimp-Shack.com, but the world doesn’t follow Jim. Given the size and influence of PayPal & eBay, we’ll likely see this improvement (and variants) duplicated across the web over the next 6 months.

From Subtraction:
In fact, I’ve always wondered why a pull-down menu or radio buttons was necessary to identify card types at all. The very first digit of any credit card already indicates what kind of card it is. If you’ve got a card that starts with a 3 then it’s an American Express; with a 4 then it’s a Visa; with a 5 then it’s a MasterCard. By simply entering the number, the system should be able to discern that information automagically. To my knowledge, there’s no value in asking the user to identify the kind of card they’re using if they’re already entering the card number anyway.