Disable my Phone Number that I placed on Customer Billing Statement

[Ineedhelpplease]

How can I remove this? Thanks

[Helen]

Hi, @Ineedhelpplease! Thanks for your question. 

A phone number is a mandatory requirement for your Shopify Payments customer billing statement, and so it cannot be removed; It can only be edited.

We have this put into place in order to protect our merchants, and assist with good communication practises with their customers. If a customer doesn’t recognize a charge on their credit card statement, the phone number is there so that your customer can contact you directly to clarify. If no phone number is provided, your customer will most likely contact their bank, which then runs the risk of resulting in a chargeback. 

Chargebacks can be challenging and frustrating. Shopify doesn’t have any involvement or influence upon a chargeback once it has been placed; The entire process is initiated, managed and decided upon by the customer’s bank. Therefore, it’s best to have measures in place, such as providing a phone number on your customer billing statement, in order to avoid any misunderstandings. I recommend reading through the Help Doc for Preventing chargebacks and inquiries for additional steps to help deal with situations that have the potential to result in one.

Hope you find this information helpful. If you have any other questions or concerns, please let me know!

[AAmeer92]

Hi,

I have read your answer to the above question and I have the same issue and would like to remove the number. Usually, people using Shopify, are sole traders. I for example do not want to share my phone number with customers and would rather share my email. Phone numbers can be sold to other companies and you can end up in never-ending selling of your phone number to people who will keep calling wasting your time.

If it is to prevent chargeback, the bank could have my phone number in their storage to or back statements but not the customer. When it really required, they can share it. That's how it should be. The customer will definitely have email receipts which they can refer to if they find an unrecognised payment on their account.

I mean this whole thing opens problems for sole traders who want for example only email contact to their business. Most if not all sole traders won't have call centres to answer to customers.

I hope this can and will be addressed by Shopify. In other competitors like Bigcommerce, that is not a thing or requirement!

Regards,
Alnaser

[Julie_k]

Completely agree with AAmeer92. 
This should be optional. Customers contact us via online chat or email and that is all I want to happen. I do not feel safe knowing that each customer has my personal phone number. Please fix this.

Regards,
Julie

[paulson1]

I too agree with @AAmeer92 

It will be better if you make an email id mandatory which will allow us to go through the query in detail and get back to the customer with a proper explanation.

Thanks

[grippy_gecko]

I also agree with AAmeer92, I am a sole trader and a streamer. Giving out my personal number so that people can troll me by phoning me mid stream would be terrible. Very few people have my personal number and I would never post it in a public place. I cannot afford to run a separate business phone just for my merch store. Now I am going to have to look into how to get a virtual phone number to use for this. 

We should have the choice of giving customers a phone number or not. Some really big businesses don't even have phone numbers that are available to the public, how much less a sole trader, who has nobody to take the calls but themselves.