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Transaction description

Find out what shoppers see on their bank statement and how you can change it.

When shoppers check their bank statements, they need be able to easily identify the charges they see. If shoppers don't recognize the transaction by the description associated with it, there's a high risk of chargeback.

To help your shoppers easily identify the payments made to your business, you can customize and personalize the transaction description. This can be accomplished in the following ways:

  • Using the live Customer Area: you can assign a single transaction description that applies to most card payments and some other payment methods for your merchant account or store.
  • Using the Management API: you can assign a distinct transaction description for each individual payment method for your merchant account.

You can't configure your transaction description in the test environment.

The text that describes the transactions is also known as a statement descriptor, shopper statement, or billing descriptor.

Check your transaction description

To check your transaction description in your live Customer Area, you need to have one of the following roles:

  • Merchant admin
  • Change payment methods

To find out how your business appears on your shoppers' bank statements:

  1. Log in to your live Customer Area.
  2. Switch to the merchant account or store.
  3. Go to Settings > Transaction description.

Here you can see your current settings as well as configure the description for most card payments and some payment methods.

If you already customized the transaction description with our Support Team directly, saving any changes will overwrite those settings.

Configure the transaction description

You can configure the transaction description:

The description can be maximum 22 characters including spaces. Anything after this may not appear on your shoppers' bank statements, depending on the bank.

Allowed characters:

  • Lowercase and uppercase characters: [a-z] [A-Z]
  • Numbers: [0-9]
  • Special characters: ., ,, ', _, -, ?, +, *, and space.

You can configure your transaction description to be:

  • Dynamic values : a string specific to the individual payment. For example, My Company #00123.
  • Doing Business As name : a fixed string that represents the name of your business. For example, My Company.
  • Combination : a fixed string that represents the name of your business, followed by a string specific to the individual payment. For example, My Company + #00123 results in My Company #00123.

To configure the transaction description for all supported payment methods in the live Customer Area, you need to have one of the following roles:

  • Merchant admin
  • Change payment methods

When you configure the transaction description in the live Customer Area, changes affect only your current payment methods. If you add a new payment method, its transaction description defaults to your Doing Business As name. We recommend you reconfigure your transaction description after adding a new payment method to ensure your transaction description is consistent across all payment methods.

To configure the transaction description:

  1. Log in to your live Customer Area.
  2. Switch to the merchant account or store.
  3. Go to Settings > Transaction description.
  4. Configure the transaction description you want.

Any changes you save are applied immediately to all the transactions processed through that merchant account from that moment onwards.

When enabled, you can set a unique transaction description for each API request using the shopperStatement field. If not enabled, values you send through the shopperStatement field will not appear in your shoppers' bank statements.

This lets you customize the transaction description for each of your shoppers. For example, you can add the order reference number corresponding to the payment.

If you enable dynamic values, but you don't send a value in the API request through the shopperStatement field, your Doing Business As name will be used instead.

The Management API type for this setting is dynamic .

(Optional) Add a localized transaction description

In addition to the shopperStatement, you can add a transaction description for local markets that use different character sets. To do this:

  • Enable dynamic values.
  • Send the localizedShopperStatement field in your API request.

We recommend that you send localizedShopperStatement and shopperStatement for Visa and Mastercard transactions in Japan using Japanese cards. Adyen supports the ja-Kana character set.

  • If you don't send a localizedShopperStatement, shopperStatement is used.
  • For cross-border transactions, shopperStatement is used.

When enabled, the transaction description is your 'Doing Business As' name, which is a fixed value you can configure in your Customer Area for each merchant account. If you don't configure the DBA separately, we will use your legal trading name known to Adyen. We recommend that you set your DBA name to the name by which your shoppers know your business.

The city in the address for your merchant account is automatically included in the transaction description, so you don't need to include it in your Doing Business As name or dynamic value.

The Management API type for this setting is fixed .

With this setting, the Doing Business As name is used as a base for the transaction description. The shopperStatement set in the /sessions or /payments request is appended to this description. If the combined length exceeds 22 characters, banks may truncate the string.

To use a combination of a fixed and dynamic transaction description, you can either:

Payment methods

These are the payment methods for which you can configure the transaction description in your Customer Area.

For other payment methods, you might be able to configure the transaction description with the payment method directly.

Cards

The transaction description you configure in your Customer Area applies to card payments made through the following networks:

  • Visa
  • Mastercard
  • Maestro
  • Diners
  • Discover
  • Cartes Bancaires
  • China Union Pay (CUP)
  • JCB
  • Girocard
  • Eftpos
  • Interac
  • Pulse
  • Nyce
  • Star

Wallets

Your transaction description configuration will also apply if the shopper is paying using a wallet payment method that contains one of the card brands above.

For example, if a shopper pays with Apple Pay using their Visa card, the transaction description you configured in the Customer Area will be used.

Other payment methods

The transaction description you set in your Customer Area also applies to payments made using:

  • Bancontact (BCMC) - both card and mobile integrations
  • iDEAL