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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

I have a few customers like that. They sign up, forget about it, then they see it on their statement and issue a chargeback. Not only do they get their $20 back (that they very willingly signed up for), but I have to pay another $35 to Stripe for the privilege of having a forgetful customer who couldn't even be bothered to email me for a refund.

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> I have to pay another $35 to Stripe for the privilege of having a forgetful customer who couldn't even be bothered to email me for a refund.

I've seen some businesses send a pre-billing email telling customers that they'll be charged on a certain date, so that customers have time to cancel if they want.

Cloudflare does that for domain renewals, sending out emails 30 and 60 days before.

Of course, there are also some businesses that hope that customers forget that they're subscribed, so that there's breakage.

Mine is a one-off payment :( They just forget they paid for it, plus the company name isn't the same as the app name, so they just go "welp, someone must be stealing from me!" and request a chargeback.

Anecdotally I helped a client entirely eliminate their chargeback rate by creating a new subsidiary named directly after their product, so that the billing line item was obviously the product. They also saw a slight increase in inbound sales, which surprised me.

That's a great idea, but it's only helpful above a certain sales volume, which I don't really have. It's just disappointing when the charge back happens, but the economics of the business don't really warrant doing anything about it.

Were you dealing with some other payment processor or bank that didn't allow custom statement descriptors? Stripe and PayPal let me write whatever I want there.

Completely by accident, I have a setup that sends a pdf invoice to customers a couple of days after the sale. I’m pretty sure it’s a stripe option I must’ve misclicked.

Anyway- turns out that on the rare occasion someone’s had an issue, this gives them a really easy mechanism to write to me and tell me about it. They let off their steam in the email and then we make things good together. (Yet another reason why I always oppose noreply email addresses)

I still don’t know what or where the setting is, mind.

That's a great idea, thanks! I've found and enabled a few emails, though I think the actual invoice email is a checkout parameter. This should help, thanks!

Thanks for your thanks! Let me know how you get on, I’d love to know if this is a secret knowledge thing that turns out to work for other people too.

Can't you put the name of the app in the booking text?

Hmm is there a field for that? I must have missed it while implementing, I'll look, thanks!

It does have the description of what you're buying ("Dead Man's Switch subscription") but I don't know if that gets to the bank statement.

I'm not familiar with your e-commerce software, but generally payment transactions have a description field that makes it onto bank statement.

I just use Stripe, hopefully that works, I'll check. Thank you.

> Cloudflare does that for domain renewals

That's just standard. Every domain registrar/vendor does this.

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