Why did I receive a payment receipt from Stripe when I didn’t buy the balloons?
Stripe can only complete a transaction with a valid email address. If an invalid email address is entered the card payment box appears greyed out so it’s not possible to enter any card details.
Rather than refuse the payment stripe tries to guess a valid email and adds it as a guest. I have no idea how stripe arrives at the guessed email but 100% of the time it’s the race organisation email.
The most common invalid emails are myname@gmail (no .com at the end) or – placing “.co.uk” at the end of a domain that’s “.com” or adding spaces. This problem is partially caused by not needing to login before buying a balloon/duck. I don’t want to add the barrier for buyers needing to setup an account before they can buy a balloon. Asking people for yet another password and sending email account login is the worse part of the internet.
I reached out to stripe support to ask about removing this feature. It seems it’s something they can’t do and the stripe reply is below. If you’re the race organiser the invalid email will be in your admin area and usually it’s easy to work out if you need to contact the buyer.
Hi there,
Thank you for reaching out. I understand you’re having concerns about notifications being received by your customers when they were marked as “guest”. I’ll be happy to assist you.
Checkout Sessions that don’t create Customers are associated with guest customers instead. Stripe automatically groups guest customers in the Dashboard based on them having used the same card, email, or phone to make payments. This unified view helps you review purchasing behavior, refunds, chargebacks, or fraud.
Stripe will create guest customer views when the merchant does not save customer contact and payment details via a Customer API object. Guest customer views will be presented in the “Customers” tab of the Dashboard and in the search results page, making it easier for businesses to understand their guest customers.
Moreover, can you provide further details about the email notification that they are receiving? A screenshot of it will greatly help so we can check thoroughly about this.
I look forward to your response. Feel free to get in touch with us in the meantime if there’s anything else we can help with.
Best,
Shy
I guess being able to accept a payment after an invalid email is better than refusing the payment.
When multiple balloons/ducks are purchased we have set the form to auto complete the buyers name and email after the first balloon/duck info is collected. It’s possible to have the above issue if the names & email addresses are changed for each balloon / or if 1 balloon has an invalid email address.