[stripe-api-announce] Dynamic statement descriptors

[Jeff Balogh]

Hey there,

You can now add a per-transaction description-a "dynamic descriptor"
in the industry jargon-that will show up alongside your business name
on your customers' credit card statements. These descriptions provide
more context about a purchase and can help reduce the likelihood of
chargebacks.

To get started, just pass a `statement_description` parameter when
creating a charge or plan. There's also more info on our blog post:
https://stripe.com/blog/dynamic-descriptors

The `statement_description` will be combined with the descriptor for
your account, which is available at https://manage.stripe.com/account.
Note that the statement description length is limited to 15
characters, and cannot contain the greater than, less than, single
quote, double quote symbols (>, <, ', ").

If you have any questions or feedback-about this or anything else-just
reply here!

Jeff

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[Peter Keen]

This is great news! Thanks Jeff.

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[Dan Wood]

Question about your new statement description parameter!

(First of all, YEAY, very handy, thanks for adding this!)

From the documentation's example, it's not clear where the prefix of "RunClub" is coming from.  How do I set that first part, or find out exactly what it will be for us?

Also what is the character limit on that part?

I want to put our product names after our company name, but if the first part could look more like a website (e.g. "KARELIA.COM") then it might help them recognize us.

statement_description optional, default is null
An arbitrary string to be displayed alongside your company name on your customer's credit card statement. This may be up to 15 characters. As an example, if your website is RunClub and you specify 2K Race Ticket, the user will see 
RUNCLUB 5K RACE TICKET. The statement description may not include <>"' characters. While most banks display this information consistently, some may display it incorrectly or not at all.

Thanks.


Dan 




P.S.  On the stripe blog announcing this feature, there is a mail link to jeff+des...@stripe.com which DOESN'T ACTUALY WORK.  Bounce city!!!!!!!!!!!

[Dan Wood]

P.S.  On the stripe blog announcing this feature, there is a mail link to jeff+des...@stripe.comwhich DOESN’T ACTUALY WORK.  Bounce city!!!!!!!!!!!

[Jeff Balogh]

On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 11:33 AM, Dan Wood <kar...@me.com> wrote:
> Question about your new statement description parameter!
>
> (First of all, YEAY, very handy, thanks for adding this!)
>
> From the documentation's example, it's not clear where the prefix of
> "RunClub" is coming from. How do I set that first part, or find out exactly
> what it will be for us?

The business name that shows up on statements is visible and
modifiable in the "Statement descriptor" field on
https://manage.stripe.com/account

> Also what is the character limit on that part?

The character limit on the combined business_name +
statement_description is 22 characters (as set by bank protocols).
We'll combine the two strings and send the first 22 characters.

> I want to put our product names after our company name, but if the first
> part could look more like a website (e.g. "KARELIA.COM") then it might help
> them recognize us.
>
> statement_description optional, default is null
> An arbitrary string to be displayed alongside your company name on your
> customer's credit card statement. This may be up to 15 characters. As an
> example, if your website is RunClub and you specify 2K Race Ticket, the user
> will see
> RUNCLUB 5K RACE TICKET. The statement description may not include <>"'
> characters. While most banks display this information consistently, some may
> display it incorrectly or not at all.
>
>
>
>
> Thanks.
>
>
> Dan
>
>
>
>
> P.S. On the stripe blog announcing this feature, there is a mail link to
> jeff+des...@stripe.com which DOESN'T ACTUALY WORK. Bounce
> city!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh bummer, fixing that now. Thanks for letting me know.

[Shawn Grunberger]

Other than the several punctuation characters mentioned in the API docs, is it appropriate to send in non-ascii Unicode characters into statement_description? I tried with some Japanese characters and the API and dashboard appear to handle them just fine, but I'm curious what banks will do.

Thanks,
Shawn

[Henri Watson]

Out of curiosity, I thought I’d try this myself by making a few transactions with capture set to false.

I ran my own card, providing "これはテストです。” (“This is a test”) as the statement descriptor.

The transaction made it to my bank as "HENRI WATSON A A A”

I also tried "Éstá és ú” (purposely over-accented Spanish) which made it through as "HENRI WATSON A STA A”

It seems anything other than ASCII is stripped out.

Keep in mind I only tried this with one card, on one network, with one bank. Other banks/card networks might react differently but I wouldn’t bet on it.

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[Jeff Balogh]

Unfortunately, our current bank/network pipelines are limited to ASCII
characters for statement descriptors. We can accept and store Unicode
characters but they will be stripped out as they leave Stripe's realm.

[Shawn Grunberger]

Thank you Henri for the testing and Jeff for the confirmation. This isn't surprising. Jeff, you might consider updating the docs to be more specific about this.

Shawn