For a small hobby business, I love Stripe which is similar to PayPal Pro but without the monthly service charge. With the current shopping cart integration all I have to match up orders and payments is the e-mail address making reconciling nearly impossible. I need it to be more like PayPal where the customer name, address, and my order number is included in the PayPal payment. Could this be something to be added for everyone?

Here is what Stripe support (which is awesome, I might add) says needs done:

Thank you for reaching out today in regards to gathering more information about your customer when they make a payment, I will be glad to help you out with this.

You can do this by using API to collect metadata for more information on your customers.

Updatable Stripe objects—including Account, Charge, Customer, Refund, Subscription, and Transfer—have a metadata parameter. You can use this parameter to attach key-value data to these Stripe objects.

Metadata is useful for storing additional, structured information on an object. As an example, you could store your user's full name and corresponding unique identifier from your system on a Stripe Customer object. Metadata is not used by Stripe (e.g., to authorize or decline a charge), and won't be seen by your users unless you choose to show it to them.

Some of the objects listed above also support a description parameter. You can use the description parameter to annotate a charge, for example, with a human-readable description, such as "2 shirts for test@example.com". Unlike metadata, description is a single string, and your users may see it (e.g., in email receipts Stripe sends on your behalf).

Note: You can specify up to 20 keys, with key names up to 40 characters long and values up to 500 characters long.

We’ve long supported a description parameter on Stripe objects like charges and customers—it’s a convenient place to add human-readable info. Since descriptions can be searched and viewed in the dashboard, they generally make Stripe easier to use.

We’ve noticed a lot of users resorting to embedding JSON in the description to annotate Stripe objects with more robust data such as user IDs, product sizing or color, delivery dates, shipping status, tax information, etc.

Now, we’re making it easier to associate structured data with Stripe objects. With our new metadata support, you can directly attach key-value pairs to charges, customers, and most other objects. As with descriptions, this data can be searched and viewed in the dashboard.

Metadata helps you store the info that’s most useful for your business, and we hope that it makes it easier to reconcile Stripe objects with your databases and systems.

If you would like to learn more about metadata, please refer to the links below:

https://stripe.com/docs/api#metadata

https://stripe.com/blog/adding-context-with-metadata

I hope that this information helps you out, and that you will be able to add the information for your customers that you were wanting to add.

Please feel free to contact me with any further questions, and I will be happy to help you out.

Best regards,
Greg

Thank you,
Jan

Eco-friendly Unique T-shirts and Unusual Greeting Cards
http://www.EquineAddicts.com

Hi,

Vince/Andy, could you guys please let me know if you're considering adding more info to Stripe other than what's used now? I'm going to have to go back to PayPal Pro for an extra $30 a month if you can't pass the customer name and address, and preferably the order id. Bookkeeping in the current situation is impossible.

Thanks,
Jan

Hi Jan
I'll investigate this more next week, but Stripe send back a Charge ID with which we populate the authorization number. Is it not possible to use that to match the order to the stripe transaction?

Vince

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Hi Vince,

Thanks for your reply. I shouldn't have said "impossible" as, you're right, the authorization and the email address are on the payment slip and the authorization is returned to the customer record. However, c when checking payments it's much easier to remember the order id or the customer name than an authorization string or email.

Thanks!

Hi Jan
I've added the order number to the meta data which should help with identification of the transaction. While there I've also enabled capture of the zip code and billing address which I think is a really good idea for fraud identification but will also help identify the order. I'm just waiting for some feedback from Strip as to if it is possible to pre-fill the zip / billing address.

Vince

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Thank you SO much Vince! This will make a great low-volume solution even better.