It happens to us all at some point. You're reviewing your credit card statement when you come across a charge or two whose origin is not immediately obvious. Even if the company's name can be deciphered, you still just may not recall exactly what the charge was for.
As a small or medium-sized business owner who does business online, you may not only be on the receiving end of such a mysterious charge, but you may also be a culprit, depending on how your business's name is represented on customers' credit card statements.
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Rather than waste precious time on the phone with confused customers, one option is to include a page on your Website explaining what the charge might be for. You can then set up a custom URL for this page and include it as part of your company's name on customer's credit card statements. In a post on the Web design blog CSS Tricks, Chris Coyier gives a couple of examples of how companies have done this effectively.
For example, when you make certain purchases from Wordpress.com, your credit card statement will list "WP-FEE.COM" as the seller on your statement. This might be a bit confusing at first, but if you go to the URL wp-fee.com, it redirects to a page on Wordpress.com outlining all the various charges customers might incur from the site.
As Coyier notes, they use a similar approach at Wufoo, where he is employed, and at 37signals, from whom the Wufoo team borrowed the concept.
If you use online payment services like Google Checkout or PayPal, you can typically adjust how your company's name appears on credit card statements. If you take a lot of orders online, springing a few bucks for a custom domain to appear on statements is worth it considering the time and energy you'll spend dealing with confused customers.
Of course, there's no getting around the fact that you're going to have to field questions and complaints from customers from time to time. This is just one way to add another buffer and hopefully create a better experience for customers over all.
Credit card photo courtesy of Flickr user MoneyBlogNewz
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