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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 to be able to easily identify the charges they see. The text that describes charges is known as a transaction  description, statement descriptor, shopper statement, or billing descriptor. If shoppers do not recognize a transaction by its description:

  • There is a higher chance your shopper issues a chargeback.
  • You can get a fine from the relevant card scheme related to your chargeback rate.

To prevent these issues, ensure that your transaction description contains your brand or the (chain) merchant name that is most recognizable to the cardholder (as required by the card schemes), and optionally customize your transaction description.

Requirements

Before you begin, take into account the following requirements, limitations, and preparations.

Requirement Description
Integration type Any payments integration with Adyen.
API credential roles To customize transaction descriptions using Management API, make sure that you have the following role:
  • Management API — Payment methods read and write
Customer Area roles To customize transaction descriptions using the Customer Area, make sure that you have one of the following roles:
  • Merchant admin
  • Change payment methods
Limitations See the payment methods for which you can configure the transaction description in your Customer Area.

Without customization

Without customization, the transaction description consists of the Name set in your live Customer Area under Settings > Account settings combined with the City and the Country/Region from your merchant account address.

The city and country/region are always added to transaction descriptions, even if you customize the description.

Customization options

To help your shoppers easily identify the payments made to your business, you can customize the transaction description on various levels:

  • For a merchant account, store, or payment method, using the live Customer Area. The same settings are used for most payment methods.
  • For a payment method, using a live Management API endpoint. In this way you can differentiate settings per payment method. Not all payment methods that are available through Management API support specifying a transaction description.

You cannot customize your transaction description in the test environment.

Transaction description settings that you can customize are:

  • Doing Business As (DBA) name: adds a fixed value that represents your business.
  • Dynamic values: adds the transaction-specific shopperStatement that is specified in the payment request.
  • Combination: adds your DBA name followed by the shopperStatement from the payment request.

Doing Business As (DBA) name

Your DBA name is a fixed value that represents your business. To add your DBA name to your transaction descriptions, you need to turn on this setting, and customize the string to use. You can do this in your live Customer Area or in a request to a live Management API endpoint

We recommend that you set your DBA name to the name by which your shoppers know your business.

Dynamic values

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

To add a 'dynamic', transaction-specific shopperStatement string to your transaction descriptions, you need to turn on this setting in your live Customer Area or in a request to a live Management API endpoint. In addition, you need to specify a shopperStatement in each individual payment request.

Be aware of the following:

  • If you do not turn on dynamic values, the shopperStatement value from the payment request will not appear in your shoppers' bank statements.
  • If you turn on dynamic values but do not send a shopperStatement value in the payment request, your DBA name will be used instead.

Combination

To add both your DBA name and a transaction-specific shopperStatement string to your transaction descriptions, you need to turn on both these settings in your live Customer Area, or specify the append option in your request to a live Management API endpoint.

With this setting, your DBA name is used as a base for the transaction description. The shopperStatement defined in the payment request is appended to this description.

For this to work properly, you need to:

Check your transaction description

Using your live Customer Area you can check the transaction description that applies to your merchant account or store.

Using the Management API you can check the transaction description that applies to specific payment methods.

Customize the transaction description

When you configure the transaction description, take into account that the description can be a maximum of 22 characters including spaces for the DBA, Dynamic values, or combination. Anything exceeding that is truncated and left out. What remains is then sent along with the city and country/region.

Allowed characters:

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

Using your live Customer Area you can customize the transaction description that applies to most payment methods for your merchant account or store.

Using the Management API you can customize the transaction description that applies to a specific payment method. A payment method-specific customization overrules the general transaction description settings from your Customer Area.

Specify a shopper statement

If you want your transaction descriptions to contain a dynamic shopper statement, it is not enough to configure dynamic values or a combination of DBA name and dynamic values. You also need to add a shopperStatement field to each payment request.

  • For ecommerce transactions, add a shopperStatement field to your /sessions or /payments request.
  • For point-of-sale transactions, pass the shopperStatement inside the SaleToAcquirerData field of your Terminal API request.

(Optional) Add a localized transaction description

If you are active in a local market that uses a different character set, you can add a localized shopper statement. This is supported for ecommerce transactions using the /payments endpoint.

To do this:

  • Configure dynamic values or a combination of DBA name and dynamic values.
  • In your API request, send both the shopperStatement field and the localizedShopperStatement field.
    If you do not send a localizedShopperStatement or leave it empty, shopperStatement is used.
    For cross-border transactions, shopperStatement is used.

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.

Payment methods

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

For some other payment methods you can configure the transaction description using Management API, if the payment method is available through Management API.

Cards

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

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

Wallets

Your transaction description configuration also applies if the shopper paid 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 from your Customer Area also applies to payments made using:

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

See also