djcfranse

Thanks for the explanation — this finally makes the situation a lot clearer.

So, if I understand correctly, when a customer uses iDEAL and chooses to save the payment method for future use, Stripe stores it as a SEPA mandate behind the scenes. And then future payments may appear (and behave) as SEPA Direct Debits, even if SEPA is disabled in my Stripe Dashboard. That’s quite surprising.

I’ve now disabled the setting “Enable SEPA Direct Debit tokens for other methods” as suggested.

That said, this behavior is deeply problematic:

• Customers are not made aware that a saved iDEAL payment will later result in a SEPA direct debit.
• Merchants (like myself) are not given any warning or ability to block the SEPA payment if it was unintentionally initiated.
• In my case, SEPA Direct Debit was explicitly disabled in Stripe, and still it was used — which I find unacceptable.

This should really be handled differently, or at the very least communicated clearly to both the customer and the merchant at checkout. I appreciate your help and hope WooCommerce and Stripe will review how this is managed in future updates.

Thanks again for the support.