
Dynamic statement descriptions - tweakz
https://stripe.com/blog/dynamic-descriptors
======
pc
To hijack our own thread: there was a lot of discussion on HN last week about
whether Checkout (our drop-in payment form) should support disabling the
Remember Me functionality[1].

That day -- and over the week since then -- we had several long internal
discussions about it. We've decided to go ahead and add the ability to disable
it. This is now documented at [2].

We want Checkout to be simple, and we didn't want to add too much
customization since doing so would go against the grain of the product. The
whole point of Checkout is to provide a merchant with the right defaults and
to improve over time. But we decided that Remember Me is a special case
because there's the appearance of potentially misaligned incentives: someone
could argue that Remember Me exists for Stripe's benefit and at the merchant's
expense.

This is exactly the opposite of what we're trying to do -- the goal is to
increase conversions for businesses using Checkout and to get better at doing
that over time. But we're adding the opt out to emphasize that we're not
trying to force anything.

If you do disable the checkbox, users who stored their accounts elsewhere will
still be able to pay on your site in a single click. (This seemed like the
most merchant-friendly option to us -- this way, you can still take advantage
of the network.)

Thanks for all the feedback!

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7349607](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7349607)

[2] [https://stripe.com/docs/checkout](https://stripe.com/docs/checkout)

~~~
zrail
This is great to hear, Patrick. Thanks for the update, I'm sure lots of people
are going to be happy about it.

------
aculver
This is awesome.

Can `statement_description` also be supplied when attempting to `pay` an
invoice? For example, with [http://churnbuster.io/](http://churnbuster.io/)
we're frequently reopening and calling `pay` on 2-3 past due invoices for
customers who have been receiving service while in an email or phone campaign
to get their updated payment information. Currently we automatically generate
an email to the customer explaining why they're seeing 2-3 charges in close
succession, otherwise they'll email or call wondering why they were "double
billed." However, it would be _awesome_ be able to include "january" or "past
due" when charging those invoices.

~~~
jbalogh
That's a great idea! Let me see what we can do.

Feel free to email jbalogh@stripe.com (or post here) if you have any other
feedback.

------
zrail
This is great, and has a lot of potential to reduce confusion and chargebacks.
You can do a lot of things with 15 dynamic characters, including putting in
base32 unique codes and URLs.

Another really useful example of creative use of the descriptor comes from
37signals' blog from 2009. They put a URL in the descriptor and reduced
chargebacks 30%:

[http://signalvnoise.com/posts/1545-how-we-reduced-
chargeback...](http://signalvnoise.com/posts/1545-how-we-reduced-chargebacks-
by-30-as-a-percentage-of-sales)

