Setting Stripe Descriptions

Here's an example and something I've noticed regarding inconsistency:

If you look at every single user's invoice via CBSubs / Payment baskets, regardless of payment gateway and recurring vs non-recurring, every one of the invoices have the column "item" with the following content: "Subscription Plan: Plan Name for Username"
- one inconsistency I've found with this... PayPal recurring item = "Subscription Plan: Plan Name for Username", whereas PayPal non-recurring item = "Subscription Plan: Plan Name: for Username". Note the difference being the ":".

Can you please use that for all descriptions regardless of payment gateway and recurring vs non-recurring? So in our case, for Stripe & PayPal recurring & non-recurring etc...?

Apologies for being so tedious, however as I'm sure you respect, it is important to have consistency across the board and for all code to be precise
- this helps with all other automations, such as bookkeeping via 3rd party apps and many other things including CBSubs invoices, payment gateway data etc...

However, the recurring payment (a new one) came in with the description = Subscription creation

Nothing I can do about that. Stripe is doing that and I could never discover why. We send descriptions for every API call that has them. Suggest contacting Stripe regarding why they aren't using the description for those payments.

Can you please use that for all descriptions regardless of payment gateway and recurring vs non-recurring? So in our case, for Stripe & PayPal recurring & non-recurring etc...?

That's not set by the gateways it's set by you. Edit all your plans and under Pricing ensure the "Payment invoice item text" parameters are consistent for all your plans. Next in CBSubs > Settings > Display > Baskets adjust "Payment basket and gateway item text" parameters accordingly.

Note none of these changes will do anything for existing recurring payments.

krileon wrote:

Nothing I can do about that. Stripe is doing that and I could never discover why. We send descriptions for every API call that has them. Suggest contacting Stripe regarding why they aren't using the description for those payments.

I will contact them back again, the last time, they ensured me that was a result of CBSubs not providing it per the documentation they sent. I'll let them know it is still not recognizing it somehow.

That's not set by the gateways it's set by you. Edit all your plans and under Pricing ensure the "Payment invoice item text" parameters are consistent for all your plans. Next in CBSubs > Settings > Display > Baskets adjust "Payment basket and gateway item text" parameters accordingly.

I've confirmed all plans are identical via payment invoice item text. This appears to be a result of recurring vs non-recurring payments. When recurring there's no ":" in the description (item) whereas when non-recurring, the ":" is there. This isn't a big deal, however if it's impacting this, it could be impacting other things as well. Thank you!

I will contact them back again, the last time, they ensured me that was a result of CBSubs not providing it per the documentation they sent. I'll let them know it is still not recognizing it somehow.

We already created a feature ticket, implemented, and released a new CBSubs build with the descriptions set in the checkout sessions subscription_data and payment_intent_data. This isn't going to fix existing subscriptions though. I don't know where else to set descriptions as I've already checked all of our endpoints that support them. You can check all of this for yourself in Stripes developer dashboard and see our API calls to Stripe.

I've confirmed all plans are identical via payment invoice item text. This appears to be a result of recurring vs non-recurring payments. When recurring there's no ":" in the description (item) whereas when non-recurring, the ":" is there. This isn't a big deal, however if it's impacting this, it could be impacting other things as well. Thank you!

Those are the only 3 settings that govern what we display and send for baskets. Specifically it sets the item_name for a basket and is what we send to payment providers.

Payment item text: [PREFIX_TEXT] [ITEM_NAME][VALIDITY_IF_NOT_AUTORECURRING] for [USERNAME]
Payment processor item text (short): [PREFIX_TEXT] [ITEM_ALIAS][VALIDITY_IF_NOT_AUTORECURRING]

I believe the colon is added by [VALIDITY_IF_NOT_AUTORECURRING], which is hardcoded in. Simply remove that section if you like. Not this won't have any impact on existing baskets.

Thank you for the details, this makes sense per the "[VALIDITY_IF_NOT_AUTORECURRING]" causing the ":".

I've looked through the webhooks/API information and it's quite confusing from Stripe's end because there are multiple methods they use such as charge.succeeded, invoice_payment.succeeded etc.....
I can see the description in some places but in others it is NULL or defaults to their "Subscription creation" or otherwise...

Please allow me some time to have them look further into this. I don't want you having to put in unnecessary time for something they can provide more clarity on. They have confirmed the description was passed for a specific payment I used as an example, however it wasn't used via Stripe side.

So I will respond as soon as I hear back from them and hopefully we can get this resolved once and for all
Thank you kindly!

Hi, I received the following from Stripe; could you please let me know how to respond?
————
In order to provide the proper assistance I would need more details from you.

Would you be kind to provide the following information?

- Full snippet code of the checkout session and creation of the subscription in plain text

- The expected description that you set when you created the checkout session