Important Note About Using Soft Descriptors: Please contact your First Data Relationship Manager or Sales Rep and have them set your "Foreign Indicator" in your "North Merchant Manager File" to "5".
A descriptor is a piece of identifying information about a merchant, e.g. business name, phone number, city and/or state, which appears on buyers’ credit/debit card statements. These descriptors remind cardholders of the details of the purchase and give them a way to contact the merchant. The standard descriptor information that gets passed through to the cardholder’s statement is the DBA name and customer service phone number that you provide with your merchant account application.
Payeezy Gateway supports dynamic soft descriptors that can be modified on a per-transaction basis. For most eCommerce/MOTO businesses, the DBA name and phone number is enough information to pass through to a customer’s credit/debit card statement, however for some businesses there is a need to put more descriptive information to minimize customer disputes and chargebacks. Any information entered in the soft descriptor fields will overwrite what would normally appear on a cardholder’s statement, so it’s very important to use the fields correctly. If you have any questions about the use of dynamic soft descriptors please contact your First Data Relationship Manager.
While it is the card issuer’s discretion as to how many characters will show up in each field, if you keep the DBA Name field to fewer than 22 characters and the city field to fewer than 11 characters they should all show up on the cardholder’s statement. Visa requires MOTO merchants to put a phone number in the City field. Ecommerce merchants may use the City field for a URL, email address or phone number. There are additional fields that can be used; however, the majority of those will not appear on a statement.
Soft Descriptors should be sent during the initial authorization and again during the Capture / Completion. The descriptor sent during the authorization influences the “authorization hold” which appears on the Card Statements online. The descriptor sent at capture influences the final descriptor which appears for the settled transactions. Payeezy Gateway does not automatically pull soft descriptors from authorizations to send for settlement.
NOTE: Dynamic soft descriptors are submitted at authorization and at settlement of a transaction.
Examples:
Static Soft Descriptor: ABC Merchant, Inc. 888-555-1212
Dynamic Soft Descriptor: ABCMovies.com Caddyshack 888-555-1212
(In this example, ABCMovies.com and Caddyshack are entered in the DBA Name field;
DBA Name is a mandatory field for soft descriptors. Phone numbers should always be entered with numeric characters and dashes using the format: NNN-NNN-NNNN )
or
ABCMovies.com Caddyshack cs@abcmovies.com
(ABCMovies.com and Caddyshack are entered in the DBA Name field and cs@abcmovies.com is in the City field.)
Using Dynamic Soft Descriptors in Real-time Payment Manager
The screen shot below shows the optional fields that you will see when Soft Descriptors are enabled in the RPM. These will appear underneath the optional reference fields in the POS Single Input tab. They will also appear in the recurring transaction screen. In order for the fields to show up, your merchant administrator must enable them from the Administration tab by selecting the terminal and then checking the box at the bottom of the Details tab that says “Allow Soft Descriptors” as seen in the second screen shot.
Using Soft Descriptors on Hosted Payment Page or with the Web Service API
When using soft descriptors with a hosted payment page or with the Web Service API, be sure to use the properties as defined in the integration guides.
Hosted Payment Page: https://gateway.payeezy.com/entries/407522-first-data-payeezy-gateway-payment-pages-integration-manual
Web Service API: https://support.payeezy.com/hc/en-us/articles/204029989-First-Data-Payeezy-Gateway-Web-Service-API-Reference-Guide-
Format
The information in the below table represents valid formatting for soft descriptors.