Transaction Descriptors 

A transaction descriptor is meant to describe a transaction in order to help your customer easily recognize the transaction.

Chargebee provides you with the option of adding the transaction descriptor that will appear on your customers' card/bank statements. However, the customer's bank will decide how these descriptors appear on the bank statement. This means, the bank can decide on the number of characters, capitalization of letters and words, and so on.

Additionally, the gateway you use may have several rules and restrictions about the descriptors that they pass on. The character limitations imposed by the various payment gateways we support, are as below:

Configure Transaction Descriptor 

A Transaction descriptor added is applicable for every gateway in your Chargebee site.

To configure the transaction descriptor, navigate to Settings > Configure Chargebee > Payment Gateways > Add a Descriptor

You can add a descriptor in the dialog box that opens.

Additionally, you can choose to pass a Customer ID or Subscription ID along with the descriptor. Copy paste the merge vars tag that you'd like to use next to the descriptor.

In a Payment Intent flow, in case of 3DS and all redirection flows, we attempt the payment first and a subscription is created in Chargebee only if the payment is successful.

This is the reason why the Subscription ID or Customer ID is not populated in the transaction descriptors for the first payment.

However, all the consecutive payments have the desired ID. For non-3DS flow or if the payment is already verified, the Customer ID or Subscription ID is populated right from the first payment.

Note
  • Please contact Chargebee support to enable Merge Vars tag for your account.
  • Each gateway has a limit on the total characters supported for transaction supported. Characters that fall within the limit will only be taken into account.

GoCardless 

Note
  • Supported only in Pro Plan for BACS
  • To enable this feature for GoCardless in Chargebee, please contact support 

BACS 

Alphanumeric (A-Z, a-z, 0-9) string; characters allowed:

  • space
  • ampersand (&)
  • hyphen (-)
  • period (.)
  • solidus (/)

Maximum no. of characters allowed: 10 characters

SEPA 

Alphanumeric(A-Z, a-z, 0-9) string; characters allowed:

  • space
  • period (.)
  • hyphen (-)
  • solidus (/)
  • question mark (?)
  • colon (:)
  • left parenthesis [ ( ]
  • right parenthesis [ ) ]
  • comma (,)
  • plus sign (+)
  • single quote (')

Maximum no. of characters allowed: 140 characters

BECS 

Alphanumeric (A-Z, a-z, 0-9) string; characters allowed:

  • space
  • plus sign (+)
  • at (@)
  • esclamation mark (!)
  • circumflex (^)
  • dollar sign ($)
  • percentage symbol (%)
  • ampersand (&)
  • single quote (')
  • parentheses
  • asterisk (*)
  • hyphen (-)
  • colon (:)
  • semicolon (;)
  • equal sign (=)
  • question mark (?)
  • period (.)
  • hash sign (#)
  • underscore (_)
  • comma (,)
  • square brackets
  • solidus (/)

Maximum no. of characters allowed: 30 characters

Autogiro 

Alphanumeric (A-Z, a-z, 0-9) string; characters allowed:

  • space
  • esclamation mark (!)
  • double quote (")
  • hash sign (#)
  • dollar sign ($)
  • percentage symbol (%)
  • ampersand (&)
  • single quote (')
  • parentheses
  • asterisk (*)
  • plus (+)
  • comma (,)
  • hyphen (-)
  • period (.)
  • solidus (/)
  • colon (:)
  • semicolon (;)
  • lesser than and greater than symbols ( "<" and ">")
  • equal sign (=)
  • question mark (?)

Maximum no. of characters allowed: 11 characters

Stripe 

Character restrictions:

  • Maximum no. of characters allowed: 22 characters
  • lesser than and greater than symbols ( "<" and ">")
  • double quote (")
  • single quote (')

Braintree 

Format: < DBA > * < Product Descriptor >.

  • Company name/DBA(doing business as) section must be either 3, 7 or 12 characters
    product descriptor can be up to 18, 14, or 9 characters respectively (with an * in between for a total descriptor name of 22 characters)
  • Alphanumeric (A-Z, a-z, 0-9) string; characters allowed:
    • period (.)
    • plus sign (+)
    • hyphen (-)
Note
  • Ensure 'Dynamic Descriptors' feature is enabled in your Braintree Account
  • To enable this feature for Braintree in Chargebee, please contact support 

Spreedly 

  • Spreedly supports transaction descriptors only for Bambora, Pin, PayPal Pro, Orbital, BlueSnap, and CyberSource.
  • There is no character limit set by Spreedly but gateway specific limitations will be applicable.
  • Shown in Chargebee as merchant-name-descriptor.
  • Chargebee will truncate the descriptor if it exceeds 140 characters.

PayPal Express Checkout 

Format of the descriptor:

< PP *|PAYPAL * > < Merchant descriptor present in gateway > < 1 space > < soft descriptor >

Character length and limitations:

  • The alphanumeric soft descriptor can contain only the following characters:

    • hyphen (-)
    • asterisk (*)
    • period (.)
    • space (" ")

  • The maximum number of characters allowed is 22 characters. Of this, the PayPal prefix uses 4 or 8 characters of the data format.

Note

To enable this feature in PayPal, contact PayPal Support 

PayPal Commerce 

The maximum number of characters allowed for soft descriptor via API is 30.

Amazon Payments 

The soft descriptor sent to the payment processor is: "AMZ* < soft descriptor specified here >".

Default format: "AMZ* < SELLER_NAME > amzn.com/pmts WA"

Maximum no. of characters allowed: 16 characters

Adyen 

No limitations. Chargebee will truncate the descriptor if it exceeds 140 characters.

Checkout.com 

The maximum number of characters allowed is 25.

You can use the following characters in your descriptor:

  • Uppercase: A-Z
  • Lowercase: a-z
  • Numbers: 0-9
  • Special characters: . ! * - = _

Ingenico 

Character restrictions:

  • Maximum no. of characters allowed: 22 characters, any characters beyond maybe truncated and the truncated value maybe sent to the bank.
  • lesser than and greater than symbols ( "<" and ">")
  • double quote (")
  • single quote (')

Mollie 

The maximum number of characters allowed is 140.

Global Payments 

Alphanumeric (A-Z, a-z, 0-9) string
Maximum number of characters allowed: 17 characters

Note
  • The default value will be site name.
  • Merge vars are supported.
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