[HN Gopher] TIFU by using Stripe as a payment processor for my s...
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TIFU by using Stripe as a payment processor for my small business
Author : ahiknsr
Score : 480 points
Date : 2022-07-28 08:50 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (old.reddit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (old.reddit.com)
| davemtl wrote:
| And in typical Reddit fashion, the post was removed for bending
| the sub-reddit rules. It's frustrating that a popular and highly
| upvoted post like this is just _removed_.
|
| Anyone have the original content?
| dsissitka wrote:
| Google cache:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/m0EybDN
| dsissitka wrote:
| Pasted below:
|
| TIFU by using Stripe as a payment processor for my small
| business. I used Stripe for about a year to run a small cell
| phone store in Denver, CO area. In the case of my business, I
| never had an issue processing my small payments for cell
| phones, ranging from a couple hundred dollars up to $1000.
| All of a sudden, we run a charge for $3300 because our
| primary processor in my business was down, and we had a large
| transaction to fulfill. Stripe flagged the transaction and is
| now holding the money from me for "at least 120 days"
|
| It is one thing to say this is a red flag, fine... I hear
| you... no problem. a transaction multiple times the size...
| sure. I get it. However A normal payment processor would then
| query you for documents authorizing the charge, bank
| statements, financial statements, some sort of procedure to
| remedy the issue. Stripe provides NO SUCH METHOD TO RESOLVE
| these issues.
|
| I am concerned because there are reports of Stripe continuing
| to add "30 days" to the reserve hold past the initial 120
| days, indefinitely. One article detailed a hold that was
| surpassing its 240th day. Stripe is taking advantage of a
| lack of regulation in this space to steal small merchant's
| large transactions. They see a big, outlier transaction and
| lick their chops, hiding behind KYC and "Fraud prevention" To
| hold your money indefinitely.
|
| You cannot call Stripe. They do not have a phone number.
| Their support page on their website has Phone call and
| messaging grayed out. You can only email. If you email, you
| get robots. Even in the same email thread, a different
| "agent" (with a different name and everything) answers each
| time with not prior knowledge of your history. There are no
| ticket numbers to your support request; nothing tracking it.
| The robots respond with what is quite obviously a template
| response.
|
| If you do a little bit of research about this topic, you
| immediately see this is a prevailing issue. Reports of Stripe
| taking up to $31,000 are all over the internet! Again, Stripe
| gives no manner to remedy this. There is NO ONE you can call.
| NO ONE you can talk to. More disconcerting, it seems that
| anyone who posts about this issue on reddit gets downvoted
| and teamed up against by established Reddit accounts, that I
| have to imagine are owned by Stripe. These account have some
| established reddit history on them, mainly talking about
| coding in PERL. It's a little sus.
|
| In my case, I sent my EIN letter, Sales Tax Receipt, Articles
| of Org, Statement of Trade Name, Certificate of Good
| Standing, Bank Statements, Website links, Signed transaction
| receipts, and anything I could think of to Stripe to review.
| I just received robot-responses; never got anything cleared
| up.
|
| I challenge reddit to connect me to a human being at Stripe
| that can tell me how to resolve the issue. I'm convinced It
| can't be done. This is a big problem and should be brought to
| the attention of small business owners, and regulators!
|
| TL;DR : I used Stripe to process my business transactions.
| They saw a large transaction come through and used their
| twisted TOS to steal $3,000 from my small business. They use
| gray area contract loopholes to be able to hold your money
| from you indefinitely. While you lose out on your working
| capital and ROI, they collect free interest on your money;
| potentially never returning it.
| upupandup wrote:
| At first glance thought this was a case of a zealous
| flagging system but upon careful re-reading, I realize this
| doesn't seem to be an isolated case meaning this guy isn't
| the only one that had this happen.
|
| Which makes me question just how credible Stripe's market
| valuation is. It's far likely that as we exit the era of
| cheap capital and expensive debt, the dominoes have begun
| to fall and companies are doing everything they can to
| horde cash. Especially when margins are razor thin.
|
| I could be wrong but this is NOT a good sign. Any other
| payment processor that pulls this will immediately be sued,
| so why are they risking this knowing that TOS isnt the law?
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _Any other payment processor that pulls this will
| immediately be sued, so why are they risking this knowing
| that TOS isnt the law?_
|
| What are you talking about? PayPal has been doing this,
| and worse, for a little over 20 years and has a $100B
| valuation on the public markets.
| upupandup wrote:
| What do you think I'm talking about?
|
| That didn't stop them getting sued. Up to certain amounts
| Paypal/any US processor, whill automatically forfeit in
| small claims court.
|
| So what OP could do is sue Stripe in their civil small
| claims court and Stripe won't bother sending a lawyer out
| as doing so would be expensive.
|
| Up to about $10k this should be possible. I've had many
| success by taking shady companies that screwed me to
| small claims and won by simply counting on them not
| showing up.
| hnarn wrote:
| https://archive.ph/2022.07.28-123810/https://old.reddit.com/...
| thiscatis wrote:
| Watch the Stripe apologist come out in force soon. They'll brand
| you as 100% running a crypto CP arms dealing coke selling dark
| net platform owner because surely YC darling Stripe would never
| mess up like this. Truth is they are just horrible.
| rvz wrote:
| Exactly. The Stripe fans and its nobility will try to keep
| boosting Stripe's sainthood as if they do no wrong or won't
| kill your business if you had fraudulent chargebacks (also
| known as friendly fraud) and will make sure they are only the
| exception. In reality, you are going to get destroyed by Stripe
| with such large payments, even if they are not fraudulent.
|
| They actually are killing businesses when they do that and
| locking their accounts down for months. Even if you have a sum
| like that for a business or it was an error, well good luck
| with support as you are not getting that money back and your
| business will end up shutting down.
|
| That is the dark truth that the Stripe boosters and that the
| hype squad won't tell you.
| powerhour wrote:
| You called it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32263429
| thiscatis wrote:
| Unbelievable right, going through someone's reddit history to
| try to defend a corporation and do some victim blaming.
| upupandup wrote:
| There are also apologists for coinbase. I wonder if these
| are paid "internet agencies" that realize that brand
| management is increasingly done through social media.
| iuiz wrote:
| If you look through OPs history on Reddit he does a lot of Crypto
| stuff and has Cannabis (THC) products in his shop. He is also
| gambling.
|
| > "YOLO'd may entire paycheck into a 10x margin account on NANO
| and XRP - both way undervalued right now!"
|
| Then there is a large payment on his business and Stripe has
| forward payment risk with it. I can see the red flags, can you
| too?
|
| //edit: It gets even better. Some of OPs other threads:
|
| > Buy Bitcoins for much less than in-game store prices.
|
| > Hashcat finds WPA passwords, but it is wrong
|
| > Why is my Internet connection through xfinity wifi HOTSPOT is
| now filtered by Open DNS?
|
| > [Question] Physical Mod or Network Hacking of Avaya 6402d IP
| office Phone
|
| > Just a Referral Portal to facilitate the $10 free Bitcoin Promo
| :)
|
| > Is Elon's favorite coin still going to the Moon, or with Elon's
| help, now MARS?
|
| > Can WSB drive DOGE higher than Musk did on the following day?
|
| > Not Sure Who Cares about this but my CBD/Delta8 Distribution
| and Retail Store just started accepting Crypto Payment for both
| Wholesale and Retail sales!
| sph wrote:
| Did you really go and stalk this person's profile to show it's
| OK for them to lose their money?
|
| > > Why is my Internet connection through xfinity wifi HOTSPOT
| is now filtered by Open DNS?
|
| Is this your proof of them being sketchy?
|
| Shame on you. I hope never to do business with you.
| ziddoap wrote:
| What relevance does any of that have when OP has supporting
| documents for this specific transaction, which is the only
| transaction Stripe has issue with and the only issue that OP is
| trying to resolve?
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| We don't know what relevance it might have, but it shows the
| OP participates in risky ventures in a sector with a lot of
| fraud. There could certainly be some part of the story that
| is important that OP chose to leave out because it makes him
| look bad.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _We don 't know what relevance it might have_
|
| Seriously? It has absolutely _no_ bearing on the
| transaction in question.
|
| Hashcat? OpenDNS? A question about Elon? I mean I know HN
| _hates_ cryptocurrency with a fiery passion... But that has
| _no influence whatsoever_ on this specific transaction for
| which OP claims to have all the documentation for (it wasn
| 't a cryptocurrency transaction, so why would interest in
| BTC be relevant to the transaction?)
|
| This has to be one of the worst sides of the internet. User
| posts issue X, and other users spend all of their time
| looking through post history so they can shame them and
| come up with some twisted reasoning that X is justified.
| registeredcorn wrote:
| I'm sure the alternative would go over well too. "This
| guy used a throwaway account to report a problem! Seems a
| little suspicious. What are they trying to hide?"
| austenallred wrote:
| Having watched a lot of these stories go down one thread in
| many of them is Stripe was required by some combination of
| regulators/banks to freeze funds of someone who has been
| selling cannabis, and because of privacy cannot openly say
| that such is the case.
|
| The person proceeds to escalate and escalate through every
| customer service option (including Reddit, HN) not
| necessarily because they're not getting a response, but
| because it's not the response they want.
|
| I don't know if that's true here, but I've seen it happen
| internally with YC companies many times.
| ziddoap wrote:
| And what does any of that have to do with Elon, Doge,
| Hashcat, OpenDNS, BTC, or hacking a phone? How could any of
| those reddit posts be relevant?
| austenallred wrote:
| Those do seem irrelevant to me. The cannabis one caught
| my eye though.
| ziddoap wrote:
| If parent only posted the cannabis one, with the framing
| that you did (cannabis can be troublesome in some areas,
| federal regulations, etc.), I wouldn't have made my
| original comment.
|
| Instead they went on a smear campaign, in some righteous
| attempt to label OP as deserving of not being able to
| reach support because they have posted about
| gambling/cryptocurrency/etc. Gross.
| upupandup wrote:
| This account is weird. Joined months ago, rarely posts and
| suddenly decides to become a forensic analyst to dig through
| someone criticizing Stripe?
|
| I am seeing this weird behavior more and more on HN. Inactive
| accounts suddenly seem to come out of the woodwork to defend,
| attack critics when a YC company gets involved.
|
| Even asking innocent questions like: is there an alternative to
| what this YC company is offering is grounds for flagging and
| downvotes.
|
| I think the readers can make the call as to what is happening.
| I don't buy that these are just lurkers suddenly logging in
| after months of inactivity to focus on one thread, and I've
| counted roughly about 3 to 4 HN accounts that are doing it on
| this thread alone.
| Crosseye_Jack wrote:
| If the transaction OP did through stripe was for a product(s)
| containing CBD/THC (EDIT: They sold a van. > We sold a cheap
| van in the company name. ) then I can understand why Stripe
| closed the account as it's on their restricted businesses list
| (often not because stripe disagree with the product, but the
| providers stripe use disallow them and stripe have to do so
| otherwise risk losing access to the provider for everyone). And
| once the account is closed there won't be any more transactions
| on the account to recoup the cost if transaction's get reversed
| down the road.
|
| But that doesn't excuse Stripes lack of communication / canned
| replies. Even if you are parting ways with a customer it's not
| wise to burn bridges, who knows maybe CBD/THC products won't be
| shit listed later down the road and you would welcome the
| customer back. But leaving a nasty taste in the customers mouth
| will make them much more hesitant to return.
| rk06 wrote:
| And that justify zero response to a business account by stripe?
| No, it doesn't. So stop with victim blaming and smear campaign
| nibbleshifter wrote:
| And this is relevant how?
| joshmanders wrote:
| You know Stripe didn't go through this guys socials to find all
| these threads and THAT is why they locked him down, right?
|
| Stop victim blaming and throat goating Stripe, it's disgusting.
| anonymousab wrote:
| They might have some automated system that does it. With the
| amount of money going around and the ease of deploying such a
| technology (single digit false positives don't really matter
| to the modern megacorp) I'd somewhat expect it to be standard
| right now.
|
| The really gross but unsurprising part is their sheer
| unwillingness to talk about this instance and actually work
| with the customer to clear things up.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| It's possible that the van sale was what triggered the fraud
| team to take a closer look at the account. I don't know if
| Stripe bans weed sales but if they've been selling normal
| quantities I doubt the algorithms would have them pop up as
| suspicious.
|
| Then a huge sale goes through (company van) and an actual
| human of the fraud team looks into the normal products sold
| through the account. If they then find that the products sold
| violate the terms and conditions, they've got a reason to
| lock the account.
|
| They don't have a good reason to block the sale of the van,
| though, especially if their ex customer has provided the
| necessary paperwork. They can lock future transactions and
| even all pending transactions if they have to (and demand
| proof that they don't violate the TOC for them to go
| through), but after filing all that paperwork the $3300
| transaction should just go through.
| sph wrote:
| You either die a promising startup, or live long enough to see
| yourself become just another Paypal.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| One thing stripe still has going for it is that it has a great
| user experience, both for businesses and developers. PayPal
| can't say that
| sph wrote:
| I have used Paypal almost daily as a user for more than a
| decade and it's never failed for me either.
|
| Stripe originally was great because they had a simple API,
| developer-oriented focus, and IIRC cheaper than Paypal. And I
| bet better customer service because they were smaller.
|
| Nowadays it's not cheaper, the customer service isn't any
| better, and my snarky comment isn't too far off from reality.
| a2tech wrote:
| This is now on the front page of Reddit. Someone at Stripe PR is
| going to have a bad morning.
| sph wrote:
| They'll soon be here saying sorry, CEO will be in touch with
| you and will sort this out immediately.
| ciguy wrote:
| Stripe is going the way of PayPal it seems. Many people learned
| this lesson the hard way with PayPal now they will learn it with
| Stripe I guess. You have no real recourse when these companies
| decide to steal your money and their incentives are very much to
| do so as they get to hang onto it for extended periods.
|
| I don't think it's a coincidence that this happened as we go into
| economic downturn and layoffs. Too bad they're not a public
| company, if they were I would be shorting their stock right now.
| aga98mtl wrote:
| Stripe like paypal is not to blame in this story. The problem
| is the credit card payment standard. Transactions can be
| charged back up to 180 days. This means that by giving the
| merchant the money right away, Stripe runs the risk that a
| transaction will be charged back and that the merchant wont
| have fund to cover it.
|
| Stripe like any other processor runs an algo to determine the
| risk profile of each transaction to decide if you get the money
| immediately or not. If you have a sudden high ticket
| transaction, the odds this will be charged back are much
| higher. This is why they freeze that money up to 180 days.
|
| It sucks, but it is how the credit card system works. Someone
| has to cover the chargeback risk.
| ciguy wrote:
| Temporarily freezing the funds is understandable, just long
| enough to ask for clarification or documentation from the
| merchant. Instead they decided to go the Google route of
| ignoring your customer because "algorithm said no".
| zht wrote:
| the solution isn't to blackhole your customer for 180 days.
|
| it's to provide a human being to talk to or ask for
| clarifying information
| skc wrote:
| I guess the argument then becomes one of scalability.
| tpxl wrote:
| If you can't scale customer support, you can't scale
| period.
| elcritch wrote:
| Sounds like they also closed the account as well.
| wonderbore wrote:
| First thing I thought. PayPal is known to pull this kind of
| moves, now it's Stripe's turn to steal some money "for
| security."
| tothrowaway wrote:
| Putting my dang hat on. Related:
|
| _Tell HN: Stripe brought my business to a dead stop_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21030633 - September 2019
|
| _Tell HN: Stripe shut down my 4-year business with no
| explanation_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28085706 -
| August 2021
|
| _Stripe banned us for payment disputes but we never had a single
| dispute_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28522784 -
| September 2021
|
| _Stripe Shut Us Down_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28881026 - October 2021
|
| _Help HN: Stripe shutting us down with 48 hours notice on a
| holiday skeleton crew_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29712023 - December 2021
|
| I'm probably missing a lot of threads.
| mrweasel wrote:
| If you process more than say $10,000 per year, you should have
| multiple payment providers.
|
| It's doubtful that Stripe is worse than other payment
| processors, they just process more payments than most other.
| Payment processors universally suck, partly because they live
| in fear of VISA and MasterCard. They tend to overreact or have
| automated systems that will falsely flag account.
|
| Most have okay support, but resolving issues can take time,
| especially if the credit card companies are involved. In the
| meantime, you're kinda screwed.
|
| All the stories you linked share the naive assumption that they
| could just integrate with Stripe and that's payments sorted.
|
| If you rely on just a single company to handle your payment I
| assume that what you're doing the a side-hustle and that you
| have another job that pays the bills. You need multiple payment
| processors and an easy way to switch between them, that is the
| sad reality of online payment processing. You may have a
| preferred processor, typically the cheapest provider, but you
| always have a backup. That also helps you when your primary
| processors inevitably have an outage.
|
| You could argue that you have the same issue with using a
| single cloud provider, but their incentives are a little
| different. Being too heavy handed could cause customers to
| leave a given cloud provider, costing the provider money. If
| Stripe isn't heavy-handed enough, they could lose their
| integration to VISA, costing them their entire business.
| sschueller wrote:
| 10k? That's a tiny amount to have to get a second payment
| processor. Additionally if you are dealing with physical
| cards you probably also need a second set of card readers?
| mrweasel wrote:
| Could be $10K, could be $200K, depends on your tolerance
| for risk.
|
| And, yeah I was thinking online only. If you need card
| readers you're pretty much stuck with one provider. Where
| I've seen people get in trouble with their payment
| processors it has only been online. Terminals are rather
| difficult to misuse these days.
|
| If you deal with both online and card readers, keep those
| on separate accounts. That is two account at the payment
| processor (PSP) and two accounts with the acquirer company.
| boringg wrote:
| I'm no defender of stripe (or corporations) but the one thing I
| always find interesting is that a lot of the complaint stories
| are one sided as the company can't release any information due
| to privacy. Many times these complaint stories have cases of
| fraud or other problematic issues and use the public forum to
| generate publicity. There are cases of people getting caught up
| inadvertently as well.
| lotophage wrote:
| > More disconcerting, it seems that anyone who posts about this
| issue on reddit gets downvoted and teamed up against by
| established Reddit accounts, that I have to imagine are owned by
| Stripe. These account have some established reddit history on
| them, mainly talking about coding in PERL. It's a little sus.
|
| I too am a little suspicious of anyone who codes in PERL
| Bayart wrote:
| Try doing RegEx with Bash's native engine before you start
| judging us :(
| TheNewsIsHere wrote:
| That's no joke! I have only ever been able to write
| successfully _portable_ RegEx in Bash by evaluating using
| Perl.
| omginternets wrote:
| We're judging you for the regexes ;)
| [deleted]
| User23 wrote:
| More and more it feels like the legal department is the only
| reliable way to get in touch with a human being. This sounds like
| a job for small claims.
| igneo676 wrote:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20220728124858/https://old.reddit...
|
| For anyone who is looking for the original story, which has been
| removed
| arein3 wrote:
| A solution could be to have a backup account for cases like this
| psyfi wrote:
| Take them to attribution?
| mwexler wrote:
| Did you mean arbitration?
| christkv wrote:
| In the EU most countries have a financial sector regulator. If
| this happens in the EU and a payment provider does not respond
| contact them as it will light a fire under their seats.
| davidkuennen wrote:
| I feel this. Today many people got this message from Apple
| (apparently wrongly):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32260733 which would've
| resulted in Apple holding a lot of money from me which is
| business critical.
|
| For payment processing, something like this without a means to
| appeal quickly shouldn't be allowed. It endangers companies and
| the livelihood of many people.
| xdrosenheim wrote:
| Stripe responded to a Twitter post about it, Reddit helped
| retweeting it.
|
| https://twitter.com/GenosAtHonda/status/1552588035077726208
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| Wow, that's an insane way to treat customers. No explanation of
| any kind. I guess I won't be using Stripe anymore.
| registeredcorn wrote:
| https://twitter.com/stripe/status/1552613789706567680
|
| I'll wait with bated breath.
| rutierut wrote:
| This type of canned response is so repulsive, I imagine the
| only reason why it might be a good idea to send things like
| this is because it's less offensive than nothing and just as
| expensive.
| lma21 wrote:
| And they didn't help whatsoever
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| This started with Google, but we had years and years of stories
| just like this about PayPal too. We need regulation to prevent
| companies from throwing all user-account-related decisions to a
| neural network, and then not providing a way to dispute its
| output. YouTube and the copyright cartel is another good example.
| It's ridiculous to have to say this, but this is what you get
| when you no longer have a democracy (or representative republic)
| and, instead, have a full-fledged corporatocracy/oligarchy
| enabled by the Citizens United decision. Companies must be forced
| to staff up to handle the issues that their technology causes.
| Twitter and its moderation/banning/cancelation-of-accounts comes
| to mind as well. You can tell me that they have 10's of thousands
| of people working in this area, but it's clearly not enough. I'm
| sorry, but FAANG companies all LOVE to brag about how much money
| they make for their owners. They should be forced to spend some
| more of it on making sure they address flagrant mistakes in their
| automation systems.
|
| Aaaaalllllllll of that aside, MOST of the time, with these kinds
| of stories, there's usually more to it than is being said.
| busymom0 wrote:
| As someone who's recently looking into using stripe for a small
| business, this makes me hesitant. And this isn't the first time I
| have read this type of thing about them. Google also does this
| sort of stuff with canned robot responses for play store
| developers.
| Nitramp wrote:
| I think an interesting meta take is the question why payment
| processors employ these draconic fraud protection mechanisms in
| the first place.
|
| I think it boils down to the prevalence of using simple magnetic
| stripe credit card payments. While chip-and-PIN or Google/Apple
| pay are of course also subject to fraud, not having even a first
| factor (pin/password/fingerprint) makes card copying and theft
| viable in the first place.
|
| I have no data, but I'd bet that you get substantially less fraud
| if you only process transactions with a first security factor,
| and you can probably still improve on that with a second factor
| (e.g. text message to authorize).
|
| As a consumer, I have to deal with declined transaction
| frequently (I moved which creates a mess for ZIP based "auth",
| another cause is using cards outside my home country); I find the
| whole situation hugely frustrating.
| polux33 wrote:
| epolanski wrote:
| Because not only they are not a solution to payments in
| general, not only their deflative nature will never make them
| good at being "money", but they are not even the solution to
| this very specific problem as well.
|
| Because the solution to this problem is providing a better
| customer care or face losing business and legal action.
| sofixa wrote:
| Nobody is saying there's no use case for cryptocurrencies.
| However they absolutely _suck_ in the main use case - payments.
| There are no chargebacks /protections against scams, the UX is
| atrocious or relies on an unregulated and unprotected third
| party. It's slow, it costs money to spend money. And it's also
| destroying the planet with useless electricity consumption when
| there's an energy crisis and climate change with resulting need
| for transition going on.
|
| All the rest hippie anarchist bullshit "take control",
| "inflation", "fiat" etc. is just bullshit that's either
| idealistic to the point of stupid or just stupid.
| slotrans wrote:
| > Nobody is saying there's no use case for cryptocurrencies.
|
| There is no use case for cryptocurrencies.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| Hmm, seems like this guy wouldn't get his $3,000 stolen if he
| got paid SPL USDC. The transaction would also cost less
| energy than it did through Stripe.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| "Circle Confirms Freezing $100K in USDC at Law
| Enforcement's Request"
| https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/07/08/circle-
| confirms-...
| polux33 wrote:
| Funny because you sound like a guy that could claim
| crypto is an unregulated far west full or scammers, while
| trying to prove that seizing 100K at law enforcement
| request is the same as randomly keeping 3K of your
| customers funds.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| You seem to think "we can freeze your funds" isn't an
| appealing feature to scammers, which is odd.
|
| https://www.circle.com/en/legal/usdc-terms
|
| > If Circle suspects or determines that you or any of
| your authorized users or customers, as applicable, have
| violated this these Terms, including, but not limited to,
| attempting to transact or transacting with Blocked
| Addresses (as defined in Section 13) or attempting to
| engage or engaging in Restricted Activities or Prohibited
| Transactions, and you have a Circle Account, then Circle
| may be forced to terminate your Circle Account and you
| may forfeit any USD funds otherwise eligible for
| redemption.
|
| The list of "Restricted Activities" this applies to is
| quite broad, including "provide false, inaccurate, or
| misleading information". The parent poster's claim this
| couldn't happen with USDC is readily proven false.
| polux33 wrote:
| Easiest bet to win. It's always the same arguments : fud or
| concepts from 2010s
|
| The ecosystem has vastly improved since
| sofixa wrote:
| > The transaction would also cost less energy than it did
| through Stripe
|
| Citation very much required.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| Oh no, I can't google things.
|
| https://solana.com/news/solanas-energy-use-report-
| march-2022
| sofixa wrote:
| First, that's a random chain nobody cares about that
| recently had a massive controversy of them trying to
| steal a user's fake internet "money".
|
| Second, i don't trust their numbers - how could they
| possibly know what type of electricity is used by their
| validators?
|
| Third - even _if_ we assume those numbers are true, I don
| 't see a comparison with Stripe's per transaction CO2
| emissions.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| > recently had a massive controversy of them trying to
| steal a user's fake internet "money".
|
| This is like saying that Ethereum stole from AnubisDAO
| contributors.
|
| > Second, i don't trust their numbers - how could they
| possibly know what type of electricity is used by their
| validators?
|
| I think most of the validators are hosted at Equinix
| through a deal negotiated by the Solana Foundation, but
| not all of them.
|
| > Third - even if we assume those numbers are true, I
| don't see a comparison with Stripe's per transaction CO2
| emissions.
|
| If you can find any published numbers on this from Stripe
| (or any other Ruby shop) that would be great.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| It would end up exactly the same way. Just as no serious
| merchant simply puts up their IBAN and says "wire me the
| money", no serious merchant will put up their crypto wallet
| address saying "wire me the cryptos". They would use some kind
| of crypto wallet payment provider/aggregator putting them at
| the exact same spot they were at before.
|
| Typical crypto shilling.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Sending money to an arbitrary IBAN is much more difficult
| than sending money to an arbitrary crypto wallet address.
| There is far less friction, to the extent that it's closer to
| the difficulty of clicking a link on the Internet (not
| difficult at all, in other words).
| stef25 wrote:
| FWIW it's totally possible to talk to someone at Stripe. We got
| someone on the line and successfully negotiated their fees.
|
| We're now using a 2nd payment processor that handles a type of
| payment unavailable at Stripe and they're just garbage compared
| to Stripe's backend / control panel system, which is
| phenomenally.
|
| Excellent company as far as I'm concerned.
| danpalmer wrote:
| I built the Stripe integration for a medium sized online
| retailer, and our experience wasn't quite as good as this. Our
| COO could get them on the line to negotiate our contract, but
| our engineers struggled to get useful answers out of them via
| email and our account manager often took weeks and multiple
| pings to respond to product questions.
|
| I have had amazing success chatting with their engineers on
| IRC, but it's fairly unofficial, they're limited in what they
| can do when things concern user data, and I don't think most
| customers should need to get on IRC for support.
|
| As for competitors though, I've heard from a customer "Stripe
| treat taking payments as a business, $competitor treats taking
| payments as a hobby". On balance, while not perfect, I'd
| probably choose Stripe again, but I'd get an account manager
| ASAP and try to build a good relationship with them rather than
| treating it as a black-box SaaS product that I don't need to
| interact with humans to use.
| virtualmic wrote:
| I couldn't read the story, as it has been deleted from reddit and
| maybe I am missing something here, but why don't these companies
| offer reliable one-time human support for a suitable fee?
| hnarn wrote:
| https://archive.ph/2022.07.28-123810/https://old.reddit.com/...
| joe4k wrote:
| Had a similar issue during lockdown where we had more orders than
| usual. Stripe kept the money for 3 months. Contacting them for
| support is a non-existent (robot replies). Hope a competitor is
| taking notes to all this.
| jrs235 wrote:
| One way to get a response, and a better than 120 days response,
| from Stripe is to file a complaint with the attorneys general
| offices of your state and the state that Stripe is incorporated
| in.
| sleepyhead wrote:
| "You cannot call Stripe"
|
| Ironic since Stripe requires a phone number to have an account
| and that phone number is required to be stated on the transaction
| receipt.
| orangepanda wrote:
| > You can only email. If you email, you get robots.
|
| Their dev support on discord is S-tier, but every now and then
| some issue has to be moved to email support; where it dies. It
| always takes months for something to be resolved, if at all.
|
| My only consolation is that every other provider is just as
| terrible.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > My only consolation is that every other provider is just as
| terrible.
|
| My experience with Authorize.net support was really good. Their
| tech stack/api was absolutely archaic, but you could talk to
| real humans.
| kitd wrote:
| This looks really good. Apart from anything else, they have a
| fraud detection tool that you can configure to match your own
| requirements, and can control yourself what happens to
| payments when filters are triggered:
|
| https://www.authorize.net/en-us/resources/our-
| features/advan...
| a2tech wrote:
| And the thing about their tech stack is its old..but
| absolutely workable. They have examples in pretty much every
| language, decent documentation, and support. And they are
| very slow to sunset things because their customers are slow
| moving traditional businesses. So code you write for a
| customer may work without tweaking for 4, 5, or even 10
| years.
| creeble wrote:
| In my case, 20 years. No change in API calls in that time.
|
| Very few errors, except in the early days. I hate them
| because of the complexity of the solution (I needed a
| relationship with a separate "payment processor" that has
| changed names/systems/owners five times in those 20 years)
| but I have had few problems with withholding etc.
|
| But my monthly charges and individual charges are very
| consistent, and chargeback rate very low (but not zero).
| throwaway2016a wrote:
| I have always been able to get a service rep on live chat
| within 5 minutes... which is literally a "Live Chat" button on
| their contact page not even hidden.
|
| Note this is different than the Discord dev chat which is for
| technical questions.
|
| Once I get live chat it may take a day or two to resolve but if
| it takes longer I just hop on live chat again and pester them
| until it's escalated.
| joshstrange wrote:
| > I have always been able to get a service rep on live chat
| within 5 minutes
|
| That's neat and all but try to get them to actually fix
| anything. They will 100% move you to email once you explain
| your issue (assuming it's not "I can't find my password" or
| equally basic) and then you will be in limbo. I hope you
| enjoy no one responding to your ticket for days/weeks at a
| time even after you provide them with all the info they ask
| for.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _Their support page on their website has Phone call and
| messaging grayed out. You can only email. If you email, you
| get robots._
|
| According to the OP.
| throwaway2016a wrote:
| But as you can see in the Reddit comments, there are people
| posting screen shots showing that is absolutely not true.
| Which leaves 3 options:
|
| 1. The UX was confusing and the OP couldn't find those
| options.
|
| 2. Stripe somehow has some logic that disables it
| specifically for that person or that person's region.
|
| 3. The OP didn't actually try and is lying in their post.
|
| 1 and 3 are more negative reflections on the OP than
| Stripe. And for 2 I'd need more details.
|
| I saw this in the replies to the comment:
|
| > The "chat" and "have us call you" options get greyed out
| once they have frozen your account.
|
| But from my own experience, that is wrong. Also OP didn't
| say their account was frozen just that the money from that
| particular transaction was being held.
| ziddoap wrote:
| There's someone else down thread here who says that
| they've had the call/email greyed out on their Stripe
| account as well.
|
| > _Stripe somehow has some logic that disables it
| specifically for that person_
|
| I'm not sure why you wrote this as if it'd be a grand
| technical challenge to implement. Locking-out specific
| features based on X criteria is pretty damn common.
|
| I don't particularly care in any case, I just had the
| impression that you might of missed that specific line
| when you wrote your original comment regarding the short
| wait times you've had when calling support.
|
| Edit: Seems like you saw the other post as well.
|
| > _But from my own experience, that is wrong._
|
| Well, from my vantage point I see 2 people claiming it
| gets greyed out and 1 person (you) claiming it doesn't.
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| throwaway2016a wrote:
| > I'm not sure why you wrote this as if it'd be a grand
| technical challenge to implement.
|
| No, I meant that as literally "somehow" as in "has some
| logic to"... no implication of difficulty. But I can see
| how that may sound that way.
|
| > Well, from my vantage point I see 2 people claiming it
| gets greyed out and 1 person (you) claiming it doesn't.
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| 3 people is not a large sample size. I did notice an
| issue where it is grayed out until you select a topic.
| Which may be partially at play here (which is a UX
| issue).
|
| My accounts got temp locked because they needed to verify
| some KYC information. Maybe there is another more severe
| level of lock that does gray it out. But then I'd need to
| know way more details about what Stripe thinks the OP did
| to get that lock before I start blaming Stripe or the OP.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _Maybe there is another more severe level of lock that
| does gray it out._
|
| FWIW I asked upthread to a Stripe person, and they do
| apparently grey out the support/call buttons in certain
| situations.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| As another Redditor commented:
|
| > The "chat" and "have us call you" options get greyed
| out once they have frozen your account. They do not allow
| such users to have them call. You can only receive a call
| if they have not frozen your account.
|
| I suppose you can create a second account and then
| contact support from there, but they'll probably flag you
| for ban evasion and make your situation worse.
| dekken_ wrote:
| > Their dev support on discord
|
| This is also a red flag
| anonymoushn wrote:
| It could be worse. Sorbet is on free Slack, which means any
| discussions older than a month or two are deleted.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Incredibly amateur hour if true.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| Serious question: what's the alternative?
| JasserInicide wrote:
| There's these things called "forums" that we used to
| use...
| hairofadog wrote:
| I've seen Discourse work pretty well for public-facing
| support.
| pygy_ wrote:
| Zulip is pretty good for this.
|
| By default, you have a linear, IM-like UX, but it is
| trivial to fork conversations on specific topics.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Paying for Slack so messages don't get lost?
| samber wrote:
| Stripe is developer centric. Discord has a lot of developers
| in their community.
|
| I don't really like Discord, but i must admit it is a smart
| choice.
| whateveracct wrote:
| A normal forum would be better in most ways.
| km3k wrote:
| > Stripe is developer centric.
|
| What kind of excuse is that? I've seen so many small
| businesses using Stripe. I doubt all their owners are
| developers who are comfortable with Discord.
| mabbo wrote:
| Right, but what if my mother wants to start a business?
| She's not a developer. Should she avoid Stripe?
|
| What kind of company builds itself as only being a product
| usable by _developers_? We 're a small niche market at
| best.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| I would hope your mother is hiring a developer to build
| her payment infrastructure if standard over the counter
| solutions like those iPhone swipe attachments don't work
| for her.
| registeredcorn wrote:
| >it is a smart choice
|
| For the _customer_?
| lawgimenez wrote:
| Using Discord for support is a major red flag.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| As opposed to IRC? Slack?
|
| Discord has excellent moderation tools, is economical and
| relatively user friendly (compared to IRC). If you desire a
| public space for your community to engage with you in real
| time, I'm not aware of a better alternative.
| navanchauhan wrote:
| What about good ol' forums? Indexable by search engines
| and proper moderation tools that have stood the test of
| time.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| Like a GitHub issue tracker? The concept of forums is not
| lost on me, but I think the point of a chat service
| solves different problems.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Discord is not a public space. It's not indexed by search
| engines.
| sph wrote:
| No, you're supposed to use the abysmal Discord search
| feature to find your question among a billion chat
| messages, or post it in one of the 150 channels we have
| for each topic under the sun. No sorry, wrong channel.
| Oops, your message got lost somewhere in the thousands of
| messages we receive per day.
|
| Discord support is hell on Earth.
| lawgimenez wrote:
| What's wrong with using email or Intercom?
| whiddershins wrote:
| I've heard stories like this about PayPal, I have a friend who
| claimed Chase Bank bankrupted his business in the 90s ...
|
| I'm thinking all financial players sometimes do stuff like this?
| [deleted]
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| This isn't surprising to me, and I don't think less of Stripe for
| doing this. It appears everybody is jumping to conclusions.
| Saying Stripe is "stealing" is laughable.
|
| There is a tremendous amount of fraud abound. Payment service
| providers like Stripe sit in between businesses and credit card
| companies, who proxy banks, who proxy customers.
|
| Banks are pretty solid, as are credit card companies, so the
| transitive nature of these transactions means Stripe proxies
| customers. A significant feature of modern payment processing is
| the ability to reconcile fraud for either party, but typically
| these measures are structured in a way to protect the customer.
|
| For example, you buy a $3000 computer and the business goes under
| before they can ship it to you. It's likely you can get your
| money back by calling your credit card company but it's not like
| they're being generous. What happens is exactly what is happening
| here:
|
| Money is held until it can be safely cleared without dispute;
| money is clawed back from merchant bank accounts and held until
| it can be cleared (there is practically no limit to what can be
| clawed back out of your merchant bank account).
|
| If this makes you uncomfortable, don't deal with credit card
| companies, and only take cash. It doesn't matter who your payment
| processor is, this can and will happen with any of them.
|
| I'm sympathetic to the OP here, but from a business perspective,
| the fact that this is such a significant event is a red flag.
| Shit happens -- your credit card could be stolen, you could be
| robbed, you could be defrauded -- it's prudent to have a safety
| net for when such things occur. And while realistically such
| safety can be unreasonable to secure, that just signals to me
| that so much of society is living at the edge of a knife. It's
| easy to be angry at Stripe here, but I believe that's misguided.
| EastSmith wrote:
| What is frustrating for me and most of the folks here are the
| robot emails.
|
| Give me a effin proper response. I am your customer!
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Federal law requires that banks hold you harmless from certain
| perils. Your risk for the $3000 computer is limited to $50.
|
| Money is not held until cleared. Credit cards are a cash flow
| business and settle very quickly, but contract terms allow the
| credit card to recover chargebacks or other losses by nabbing
| future cash flows.
|
| My guess is the issue that triggered this is that a big
| transaction is a risk as a chargeback may not be recoverable as
| there is no baseline level of activity. Or... they suspect that
| the merchant is getting a cash advance outside of the terms of
| the contract.
|
| Other than the lack of process to resolve the hold, I always
| reserve judgement on stuff like this as you never get the full
| story.
| nfreising wrote:
| I don't think Stripe holding money is the problem here. The
| problem to me seems that there is no support to be reached at
| Stripe to dispute their decision or get a human to answer. I
| agree that OP's business doesn't seem that healthy if $3000 are
| such a big problem, however that doesn't make Stripe's non-
| existing support any better.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| I've dealt with Stripe support and it's been... fine? Good
| even? I can only assume that if they've gone radio silent
| there's a reason. I'm not convinced Stripe is acting in bad
| faith, as shitty as this is. (Unlike, say, PayPal, who is
| notorious for shit like this).
|
| At least one instance I'm aware of has to do with anti-money
| laundering regulations, where it can be disallowed to
| communicate regarding a pending investigation, but obviously
| I can't speak to if that's happening here.
| joshstrange wrote:
| I'd be very interested to know what your issue was that
| they helped with. I'm 0 for 3 (potentially 1 is fixed now,
| 1 fixed itself, and the last I gave up on). Unless your
| issue is trivial you will be thrown in limbo and go
| days/weeks without a reply.
| anonymousab wrote:
| > I can only assume that if they've gone radio silent
| there's a reason
|
| This is the fundamental mistake made when dealing with
| these corporations. They do not deserve the benefit of the
| doubt, but beyond that, any customer service system that
| has a heavy bot presence and outright removes inconvenient
| (for them) points of contact should be assumed negligent
| and suspect by default.
| norswap wrote:
| Why do you assume they're holding the money for legimitate
| reasons? I count as much more likely they're just fucking up
| and have no idea or don't care enough.
|
| Plenty of example of this, event amongst top tech companies:
| see the clusterfuck that is youtube copyright claims for
| instance.
|
| Every time there are automated flaggings, there are fuckups. We
| can accept it if there's an efficient way to challenge, but
| that's not happening. Stripe/Google doesn't care and/or it
| would hurt the bottom line too much.
|
| Also if credit cards company are much better at this, I don't
| see why Stripe gets a free pass for sucking.
| kylecordes wrote:
| All of the companies are needlessly inviting the wrath of
| regulation on themselves. Sooner or later (probably later) a
| political consensus could emerge to require detailed human
| review, subject to a regulator intervening on any/every case,
| whenever they keep more than $X for more than Y days.
|
| I suggest that it might be smarter for all of these firms to
| do a better job, voluntarily, of providing human interaction
| and review - to forestall such regulation as long as
| possible.
| balentio wrote:
| I wrote an article on this last year and submitted it here and
| got down voted into the lower levels of Hacker News hell. Later,
| of course, someone else has a similar experience with Stripe, and
| now everybody is all about it. It gets a frustrating trying to
| talk to tech people sometimes. I never know if they are going to
| be a shill mafia or actually consider the evidence.
| kweks wrote:
| You can try contacting Edwin ( edwin@stripe.com ) - he's often on
| HN and has unstuck quite a few Stripe issues for me and other
| HNers.
| coolgoose wrote:
| I appreciate your comment but this is a clear example their
| internal flow is fucked up.
| kweks wrote:
| You are correct, but the aim of the reddit post / this post
| is to get the problem solved. Billing is a complicated
| subject, and fraud is even more complicated.
|
| A well placed, polite email to C-level staff often fixes the
| problem, but can draw attention to flaws in the support flow
| - or validate a customer-hostile standpoint, at which point
| you can make an informed decision about where to place your
| business.
| peanuty1 wrote:
| I recommend Square, it works great for my mom's business.
| https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-api
| [deleted]
| lma21 wrote:
| Yet another story of Stripe holding big sums (yes 3k can be huge
| for small businesses) with no proper support structure. Consumers
| must rely on social networks to get some form of reaction.A $74
| billion company has no proper support structure. Just wow.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| I'm sympathetic that 3k can be huge for small businesses, but
| if you can't tolerate a loss of 3k, isn't your business
| practically doomed?
| [deleted]
| thfuran wrote:
| If someone broke into my house and stole my tv and laptop,
| I'd be pissed even though I can afford to replace them
| tomorrow.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| But this isn't theft? The funds are being held, they are
| likely to be returned _at some point_. Inconvenient, sure.
| But theft?
| hacym wrote:
| That could be the difference between making a biweekly
| payroll and not for a low volume small business.
| caboteria wrote:
| What would you call it if I broke into your house, stole
| your TV and laptop, and told you "I'm just holding them,
| I'll return them someday, probably 240 days from now but
| maybe later".
| thfuran wrote:
| I'd still be pissed even if they left a note saying that
| they would return the TV in four or more months.
| albedoa wrote:
| Your issue with the analogy is that it doesn't include an
| indefinite timeline for the eventual return of the
| property? You might be missing the forest here.
| AnonHP wrote:
| Two words: cash flow.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Stripe actively markets to the smallest of businesses.
|
| My church uses Stripe for various fundraising events. It
| would cause a serious cash flow issue if our payments for the
| bbq chicken fundraiser were held up for 3 months. We don't
| have $3k to pay the chicken guy.
|
| A key feature of Stripe is daily deposits. To me it's
| understandable that they will flag transactions to address
| risk. But there has to be a process to adjudicate quickly.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| It depends on the business model. For a high margin business,
| it might be fine, but for a business that has slim margins,
| it could significantly reduce the amount of product they can
| buy over the next quarter, which could make net margins
| negative.
| toss1 wrote:
| Even in a high-margin business, and even if the funds may
| eventually be returned, having funds not suddenly held by
| surprise can create real problems. These create real
| distractions, extra entirely unprofitable work that is only
| to secure what is already due to you.
|
| This is not acceptable from a critical infrastructure
| vendor.
|
| That anyone is willing to reveal just how obtuse they are
| by attempting to justify it is astonishing.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I was specifically responding to the question of whether
| or not "if you can't tolerate a loss of 3k, isn't your
| business practically doomed?"
|
| To which the answer is "It depends on the business."
| These things also don't happen in isolation; most small
| businesses will be able to survive $3k frozen for a
| quarter on a good day, but even well-run small businesses
| have bad days.
| nibbleshifter wrote:
| For small businesses, the margins are that thin.
| pc86 wrote:
| I imagine their business can tolerate a $3k loss, just
| probably not a $3k theft by their payment provider of all
| things.
| enlyth wrote:
| Maybe your business is not your primary source of income?
| sophacles wrote:
| This reads like victim blaming.. "I bet the business was
| wearing something slutty. If they didn't want the stripe gang
| to bother them, they shouldn't have been wearing _that_ ".
|
| What does a business soundness have to do with stripe robbing
| them?
| moralestapia wrote:
| What is this, really?
|
| Is this meant to defend Stripe?
|
| What a weird way of looking at things.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| A single instance of holding 3k doesn't seem like (or
| shouldn't be) a significant amount for a small business.
| moralestapia wrote:
| ???
|
| I still don't get your point.
|
| Even if it is $1, why would someone take what is
| rightfully mine?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| If you have no issue losing 3k without any reason, can I
| have 3k from your business as well?
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| It's not losing 3k, it's delayed payment
| chrisseaton wrote:
| So can I borrow it for four months? I'll invest it and
| give it back but I'll keep the interest. Oh by the way
| inflation will have devalued it. Sorry about that.
|
| Won't make any difference to you as your business is
| robust, right?
| lma21 wrote:
| For potentially 120 (+30) days? That's 5 months. Some
| people have to survive paycheck to paycheck!
|
| A delayed payment must not exceed 2-3 weeks tops.
| davidkuennen wrote:
| If you're self employed and your monthly income is 5k$
| from your business, 3k is a lot and can mean that you're
| unable to pay bills or food for this month.
| toss1 wrote:
| Clearly stated by someone who has never run a legitimate
| small business.
|
| As someone who has run them for decades, it can be a
| SERIOUS issue at the wrong time. Sure, there are good
| times where it'll hardly be noticed, and can be dealt
| with in due course.
|
| However, there are _OFTEN_ other times when $3K failing
| to show up when expected can create real problems. Cash
| Flow is key.
|
| To even suggest that it is OK for a company to
| arbitrarily cutoff funds, merely because it might be
| resolved sometime next year and "shouldn't be a problem"
| is massively ignorant and ethically bankrupt.
|
| For your own sake, and for others on HN, read the room.
| Stop posting such 'hot takes' that only broadcast your
| bad assumptions based on massive ignorance of the topic
| and distract from the actual discussion (or if you're
| just trolling for responses, pls take it elsewhere).
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| I have run a small business, and I am somewhat familiar
| with payments infrastructure. From my perspective, it is
| the room that is ignorant. Have you ever had a customer
| fail to pay an invoice on time? Have you ever not been
| reimbursed for expenses in a timely manner? Have you ever
| been charged the wrong amount? Had a supplier go
| bankrupt?
|
| If 3k cash flow made or break my small business, then I
| would've been toast within months of starting. If it's a
| real business, then 3k breaking the bank means you're
| over leveraged.
|
| I'm not saying what Stripe is doing is okay. Nobody but
| Stripe and the OP have enough context to make a fair
| judgement. It certainly sucks, especially if OP did
| nothing wrong. If OP feels this is truly unjust, then
| that's what small claims court is for. But calling it
| theft when your payment processor withholds funds is an
| exaggeration. Is it theft if I pay my bills late?
| toss1 wrote:
| >>Is it theft if I pay my bills late?
|
| Depending on how late you pay them, YES, it is theft, and
| can be so judged in court.
|
| >>. Have you ever had a customer fail to pay an invoice
| on time? Have you ever not been reimbursed for expenses
| in a timely manner? Have you ever been charged the wrong
| amount? Had a supplier go bankrupt?
|
| Yes, all of those things. And I pointed out that
| SOMETIMES, they can go by almost unnoticed and dealt with
| in due course, but OFTEN they can create real problems.
| It is one thing when they happen by accident, but when it
| is the result of capricious and hostile decisions by a
| vendor, it is an outrage.
|
| Your own argument points this out - if $3K is supposed to
| be so manageable to a small biz, then it is not even a
| daily rounding error for Stripe, and THEY should give him
| the benefit of the doubt, and not externalize these costs
| onto the small biz.
|
| I'd also point out that just the fact that you're
| justifying paying your bills late as "well it isn't
| theft" already tells me that you are in the class of
| ethically-challenged shady operators with whom I work to
| avoid.
|
| Just because you make a profit does not mean that you are
| running a sound or ethical business or personally have
| either of those properties. I'd suggest you do some
| rethinking.
| pdpi wrote:
| Average annual turnover for 1-9 employee companies in the
| uk is ~PS500k, PS3k represents around 8% of their monthly
| turnover. There's no world where that is insignificant.
| sgc wrote:
| Well then it should be f-ing NOTHING to stripe, and they
| should shorten their hold time. No doubt they, with all
| their supposed programming intelligence, can come up with
| a fancy algorithm that reduces their risk by 99% but
| releases the money within a week.
| Apreche wrote:
| This is a case for the state attorney general (or equivalent
| legal authority wherever this person lives).
| pier25 wrote:
| And Reddit mods removed it...
| ryanbrunner wrote:
| I've definitely never encountered many automated responses to
| their e-mail support. Definitely I've hit support people who
| don't know much beyond basic troubleshooting, and it's pretty
| much impossible to get escalated to the point where you're
| talking directly to a dev through support@, but generally not
| canned responses.
|
| (That might be based on our usage maybe, we're a OK sized Connect
| partner)
| ceejayoz wrote:
| A lot of organizations route suspended accounts through an
| entirely different support team focused on fraud. That team is
| often not a management priority, either.
| cdmoyer wrote:
| The OP later clarified that it wasn't a normal transaction. They
| sold a "cheap company van" using their stripe business account.
| That seems like a huge liability, since a used car seems
| extremely likely to cause a chargeback. I don't think dealerships
| would accept a credit card payment (other than deposit) for this
| reason.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/wa1zob/dont_...
| Crosseye_Jack wrote:
| Most 2nd hand car sales in the US are sold "As-is", so the
| buyer has very little recurse after the fact. The consensus is
| when it comes to 2nd hand vehicle sales is buyer beware and you
| should be taking the vehicle to be checked over by another
| garage before finalising the purchase.
|
| Last car I purchased (granted a) it was brand new b) I'm in the
| UK) I purchased the car using my debit card (I kept the recept
| for ages until it faded cause it was novel to me to have such a
| large card transaction on a small thermal printed receipt :-P)
|
| So I'm just wondering why a 2nd hand vehicle sale would be a
| huge liability thats all.
| flak48 wrote:
| I'd guess that a manual review for the automatically detected
| out-of-policy transaction wouldn't be prioritized if it's
| been flagged as a transaction outside the seller's line of
| business that they mentioned in their agreement with Stripe
| when onboarding.
|
| I kind of agree - I don't see why manually reviewing a
| transaction that probably violates their agreement with
| Stripe should be prioritized by Stripe - even if the
| transaction would eventually emerge as legit (not fraudulent
| and not chargeback-able). Because such a manual review would
| entail a cost to Stripe that is being forced upon Stripe by
| the seller's actions.
| Crosseye_Jack wrote:
| I'm not questioning the idea that the transaction was
| outside the sellers normal line of business (and tbf to
| Stripe, would imo be a valid reason to be extra careful
| with the transaction and may be justifcation for account
| termination, even if account termination seems a bit harsh
| for a first time "offensive" imo, but hey, thats ToS for
| you), just the idea that "used car seems extremely likely
| to cause a chargeback" thats all.
| flak48 wrote:
| Yep, FWIW I hope OP gets their money if not their account
| SyneRyder wrote:
| And one of the comments below that one explains exactly why
| this is a problem:
|
| _" When you sign up for your Stripe account, you had to state
| what business you were using it for. If you're doing business
| with your Stripe account that is not related to what you sign
| up for, then there are reasons why Stripe is now holding your
| money."_
|
| It's listed in Stripe's terms and conditions on Prohibited
| Items:
|
| _" Use of Stripe products to facilitate transactions on behalf
| of another undisclosed merchant or for products/services that
| were not disclosed in the merchant's Stripe account
| application."_
|
| https://stripe.com/en-au/legal/restricted-businesses
| tomphoolery wrote:
| lmao why. why would you do this. just use square cash.
| arwineap wrote:
| I enjoy the power of greenbacks, very visceral too.
| mindslight wrote:
| A paper-titled transaction seems like it should have one of the
| lowest chargeback risks. A copy of the purchase and sale
| specifying "as-is", plus signed title should be pretty clear
| cut evidence against a chargeback.
|
| It's also not terribly surprising that someone who develops
| familiarity with one tool will then apply that tool to new
| situations. The main problem here is the ever-growing financial
| censorship regime / decommodification push that insists
| companies should be prying into their customers' business.
| flak48 wrote:
| Why should Stripe take on the cost of investigating /
| handling a potential chargeback, even though it might be
| likely to be resolved in the business (and Stripe's) favor?
|
| When it comes to chargebacks it's not just customer
| experience (reputation damage due to fraud) and liquidity
| risks that Stripes or other payment providers are protecting
| themselves against - but also the actual support cost of
| handling each chargeback too.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| When these stories come up, I would like to hear enough context
| that enables me to understand whether or not Stripe is behaving
| reasonably. I understand Stripe takes customer privacy
| seriously, but even so it would be great to get the missing
| information in a suitably anonymous form.
|
| In this case, my judgment (as a small business that uses Stripe
| for similar-sized SaaS payments) is that they acted completely
| reasonably.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Fintech startup law: Every payment provider is becoming PayPal
| due to risk and regulatory pressure.
| blairanderson wrote:
| Alternatively, I use Stripe as a payment processor for my small
| business and it works flawlessly.
| negamax wrote:
| I have no idea how companies like Stripe and to a great extent
| Revolut made it to forefront of banking. They are Uber of banking
| industry. And have done shady things. As the time passes and VC
| money runs out; these companies will implode
| nostrebored wrote:
| As someone who's worked there: stripe won't. Everyone in the
| company can see the business metrics. People wouldn't be
| staying if that were true.
| negamax wrote:
| I have a close friend, working for Uber since 5-6 years now.
| I don't think he ever expected company to engage in anything
| shady. SWEs are higher up than service counter staff but in
| the game of business they are not far from being expensive
| pawns. Sorry
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| So he started 5-6 years ago, after Uber was already caught
| doing shady shit? Does not compute.
|
| I don't think Uber was ever particularly transparent,
| whereas I believe the other poster was implying that all
| Stripe employees can see revenue, profit margin, etc.
| plainly, which seems very uncommon for a non-public corp.
| negamax wrote:
| I don't remember their exact date. It's been a long time.
| They joined before IPO. My point was it was fairly long
| epolanski wrote:
| Stripe has an excellent developer experience which makes it
| easy to integrate it online.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I think people forget how much effort it took to accept
| credit cards at the time Stripe launched, too. Not just
| technical, but having to get a merchant account, which would
| be through a bank, who'd want to sell you a rented point-of-
| sale and a contract for a minimum amount of fees per month,
| and a rate hike for being a "risky online business".
| epolanski wrote:
| Well, when it launched, but few years down the road Stripe
| was already in a class of his own on the topic of developer
| experience compared to their competitors.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Yeah, I tried to leave the Stripe platform for lower fees
| and... well I'd give just about anything to go back in time
| and stop myself from doing something so stupid. Also in the
| end the %/per-transaction fees were barely lower AND they
| had a TON of hidden fees/charges.
|
| The processor lied about fees/rates, API/docs were absolute
| shit (and they were on the better end of what else I've
| seen but compared to Stripe they sucked), and I had to go
| through 3-5 video calls before they gave me API keys for
| even the dev environment. Then you get to enter the world
| of monthly charges on your account, minimum fees (if you
| don't pay enough in fees you have to pay the difference,
| for me it was $35 in fees minimum which doesn't work well
| for seasonal things or in-house test accounts), PCI
| compliance (fuck that form), even worse service, and slimy
| sales people.
|
| Even with Stripe's absolutely terrible customer support
| (that I've experienced first-hand multiple times) I'll
| stick with them over dealing with the alternatives.
| peanuty1 wrote:
| Have you tried Square?
| https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-
| api
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Square holds payments, too. Same 120 day window, too,
| because that's how long Visa, Mastercard, and Amex give
| customers to initiate a chargeback.
|
| https://www.eseller365.com/square-holding-funds-
| business-120...
|
| > Like other payment processors, we periodically review
| your sales to assess the risk of payment disputes. In a
| recent review of your account, we determined that we have
| to hold a portion of your transfer in a reserve balance.
| Beginning <redacted>, 30% of each transaction on your
| Square account will be stored in your reserve balance,
| and will be released 120 days after the original
| transaction date.
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| If I remember correctly this is actually normal for CC
| processing, because the transaction is so much higher then usual,
| they are holding aside the money in case it gets charged back.
| Not like PayPal where they silently ban the account and money
| disappears forever, could understand it being pain if your a
| small business.
| graderjs wrote:
| This is not my experience of Stripe. I've found their support has
| always been responsive and awesome over email.
| slim wrote:
| removed. anyone got a cached copy?
| redeeman wrote:
| This "rant" is in general, and not related to OPs case
|
| I would strongly recommend to not rely on stripe, their service
| level has become a joke. I get it, they have a nice API, their
| system is technically nice in many ways, and they are (or atleast
| were ~5 years ago) way easier to deal with for developers than
| the "old" players on the market.
|
| but they are kinda like google, their support is pretty much non
| existent when things arent on the "happy path", they will GLADLY
| ignore any inquiry for months if they feel like it, I know this
| for bitter personal experience.
|
| Yeah, their fees might be slightly lower than the older players,
| but the old ones you could call if it comes to it, and they will
| NOT be doing the same shenanigans on a whim, as it appears Stripe
| do.
| hnarn wrote:
| Which "old ones" are you referring to more specifically?
| apocalyptic0n3 wrote:
| Authorize.net is the old one that Stripe always seems to be
| compared against. And in that race... Stripe has already
| crossed the finish line before Authorize.net has taken its
| first step.
| redeeman wrote:
| i do not want to name specific names, but in my neighborhood
| theres a couple of big online payment processors that until
| somewhat "recently" were the ones that 99.9% of online shops
| used. I imagine it be roughly similar in other places, though
| perhaps more the bigger the country
| vemv wrote:
| If it was, say, a $30000 charge I could give Stripe the benefit
| of doubt, but $3300 is a pretty ordinary amount for any retailer.
| Could be e.g. a laptop sale, or three phones?
|
| When I see Stripe's apology here it will not be enough for me -
| not at least without a detailed blog post / postmortem.
|
| Until/if that moment happens, I'll regard Stripe as an
| untrustworthy entity and will recommend doing the same to do
| anyone I do business with.
|
| Zero tolerance for Google-style algo-decisions and stonewalling.
| w4ffl35 wrote:
| i will be keeping all of this in mind the next time im making
| payment processing decisions for small businesses.
| PeterisP wrote:
| All the alternative entities will also sometimes freeze funds
| for incoming credit card payments due to some algo-decision
| flagging them. Both fraud and such anti-fraud measures are an
| unavoidable part of the credit card infrastructure.
|
| The major difference is that some platforms offer more hand-
| holding support and some don't, but even those who will talk to
| you (e.g. your local bank) can and sometimes will refuse
| unblocking such funds for a prolonged time.
| leoff wrote:
| > When I see Stripe's apology here it will not be enough for me
|
| I'm actually just starting a business using Stripe for handling
| payments, and this makes me very concerned.
|
| Is there an alternative service one could use? Is there a way
| not to give these shady companies power to steal all my money?
| vxxzy wrote:
| Check out PastePay. Great service and a human touch!
| https://www.pastepay.com
| mtlynch wrote:
| Based on your other comment,[0] it sounds like you work for
| PastePay, which you should disclose if you're publicly
| endorsing them.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32263465
| vxxzy wrote:
| Oh no! I am sooo sorry. I don't "directly" work for
| PastPay but I do work for their sister company. Thank you
| for letting me know for the future!
| bennyp101 wrote:
| Bit of a bug in your page redirects
|
| curl https://www.pastepay.com
|
| <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=https://www.paste
| pay.com/industry/international-merchants">
|
| curl https://www.pastepay.com/industry/international-
| merchants
|
| <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
| <html><head> <title>302 Found</title> </head><body>
| <h1>Found</h1> <p>The document has moved <a
| href="https://www.pastepay.com/">here</a>.</p>
| </body></html>
| vxxzy wrote:
| It's fixed! There was an issue handling request from
| international clients.
| vxxzy wrote:
| Thanks! Yeah that is not in the page. Not sure how that
| is getting prepended. I'll send to support!
| groffee wrote:
| On Firefox page is just going into an infinite loop.
| vxxzy wrote:
| Strange!? Any chance you could send me request headers
| you are receiving?
| mmikeff wrote:
| And Safari on MacOS
| radiojasper wrote:
| Can confirm! Same here with my Firefox on Windows 10.
| TimCTRL wrote:
| Same on Chrome 103
| enlyth wrote:
| Same on Edge/Chromium
| thirdvect0r wrote:
| Happening on FF, Chrome and Edge for me
| sorenjan wrote:
| Maybe look at Klarna. This is not an endorsement, I've never
| worked with them, but as a consumer i like using sites that
| use them for payment.
|
| https://docs.klarna.com/
| pythonic_hell wrote:
| Checkout Adyen. They're practically the same.
| slivanes wrote:
| You need to do 5,000 transactions or more a month to be
| considered by Adyen.
| stef25 wrote:
| Have you compared the backends you get to use as a
| customer? I'd be surprised if Adyen even comes close to
| Stripe.
|
| Mollie for one is complete garbage.
| tc313 wrote:
| Just as a counter-anecdote, my one-person SAAS has used
| Stripe since 2017 and I've had an excellent experience with
| them, including personal customer support. Of course, YMMV.
| TimMeade wrote:
| I'm not sure of the facts on this case and always need to
| hear both sides fully before i would comment on them.
|
| But; I have run 4 different businesses on stripe over about 6
| years and have never had a serious issue. Yes there have been
| ups and downs but even with no phone number I would have to
| rate their support head and shoulders above most. Maybe 24-36
| hours for a response, but we always got one, and in most
| cases it solved the issue.
|
| We are still with them.
| PeterisP wrote:
| > Is there an alternative service one could use? Is there a
| way not to give these shady companies power to steal all my
| money?
|
| There are many alternative services listed in other comments,
| but to be clear, every single one of them has the power to do
| exactly what Stripe did.
|
| There is no way to accept credit card payments without
| accepting that power to freeze suspicious incoming payments,
| simply because fundamentally credit card payments are not
| final and can (and often will) be reversed afterward, and if
| someone promised to never freeze merchants' funds, every
| fraudster in the world would come to try out their services,
| bankrupting them in the process.
| alex_suzuki wrote:
| Maybe check out Paddle. I'm not affiliated in any way.
| Ayesh wrote:
| In a different HN thread that has no or positive reaction to
| Stripe, you'd be seeing many praises for Stripe.
|
| For local businesses, perhaps your local bank has a better
| solution? They will be cheaper (if they use networks other
| than Visa/Master), and often has zero fees when you withdraw
| money to a bank account.
|
| Here in my country, for a business that only caters to local
| customers, I pay about 2% for payments with no fixed fee and
| no fee for withdrawals, which happens daily. I can directly
| call the person who handles my queries, and charge backs have
| never been anything but a few quick clicks with no mind
| games. All I do is redirect the user to the payment page, and
| validate the payment upon arrival. The UX isn't as good as
| Stripe of course, but many of the locals are quite used to
| that UI anyway.
| Aspos wrote:
| Don't know what country you are from but guess your
| acquiring bank gets orders of magnitude less fraud than
| Stripe does so your bank can afford to take your calls. It
| boils down to wildly skewed regulatory environment in the
| US.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| They probably have orders of magnitude less revenue with
| which to pay customer service agents than Stripe has (or
| would have, if they hadn't delegated their customer
| service to the machine in the sky).
|
| We see this in many circumstances: centralization and
| scale are great for efficiency, but bad for resilience.
| [deleted]
| peanuty1 wrote:
| Square is one option.
| https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-api
| [deleted]
| informalo wrote:
| https://sumup.com
| SyneRyder wrote:
| You should always, always, have multiple ways to accept
| payments. Don't rely on one provider, even if they're the
| greatest processor in the world. Never have a single point of
| failure for your business.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| Flagging a larger than normal transaction is fine. Placing a
| 120 day hold is very much NOT fine. This should be resolvable
| within 24-48 hours after the business provides the requisite
| documentation showing the transaction to be legitimate. The
| root cause is a completely automated process devoid of any
| capability for human review like we see with so many online
| platforms these days.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Documentation can be faked, and 120 days wasn't picked
| randomly; customers have that long to dispute charges.
| sgc wrote:
| It is a tiny amount of money comparatively speaking. They
| should not put a freeze over a couple of days. If there is
| no dispute, then their risk drops exponentially. If the
| amount were much higher, they should just devote more human
| resources to verifying the charge, and still keep the
| frozen period low.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > It is a tiny amount of money comparatively speaking.
|
| It's hardly the only charge of this nature.
| metacritic12 wrote:
| What's the OP/your alternative?
|
| Oh Paypal? Look up the horror stories there. Or directly work
| with a legacy provider like FirstData? They will also freeze
| your account and won't even accept you if you just have just
| $3k of sales.
|
| Isn't it interesting that credit card processors really like to
| give crappy customer support and enjoy freezing accounts? Is it
| because they just attract misanthropic people? If only a caring
| company that didn't freeze accounts and gave wonderful support
| could enter, the field would be better. /s
|
| Actually, the problem is super structural:
|
| - Due to payment processing regulations, there is a fixed
| overhead from taking a small merchant on. (KYC, AML, ensuring
| you're not selling drugs). This makes tiny merchants incredibly
| unprofitable to begin with. Legacy providers like FirstData
| will reject you outright or make you pay fees to onboard. They
| will also make you fill out pages of paper forms and put the
| time cost on you to verify you're a legit business.
|
| We as a society have said the gatekeeping features of finance
| are more important that making sure tiny businesses have access
| to payment infrastructure. We should change this parameter if
| we truly cared about this. I suspect we don't.
|
| - Merchants simply race to the CC provider that is easiest to
| set up or have lowest fees. If you were OK paying a couple of
| hundred dollars of setup fees to, you know, properly reimburse
| your vendor for vetting you, or pay 5% fees for a high risk
| (read: tiny merchant) specialty account, you probably wouldn't
| have been frozen like this, at least without them calling you.
|
| This is exactly the problem with Google services. Are you
| paying Google a bunch of money? If you are a high level
| enterprise account where the fully-burdened cost of a 1-hour
| customer support call (~$100) is a small part of your yearly
| net margin to Google, I bet they would take your call.
| rshm wrote:
| > What's the OP/your alternative?
|
| Reach out to local credit unions or even smallish bank. They
| usually are middleman to firstdata, chase paymentech etc. But
| you get a dedicated account rep at cost of nominal monthly
| fee. Rates usually are competitive often lower than what
| stripe and paypal offers.
| sfont wrote:
| I am an extremely small account and have a merchant account
| with Authorize.net. Most of my customers pay by check so I
| even have some months where I have zero card transactions.
|
| There is a small monthly fee and the processing fee is
| variable depending on the card. Plain debit/check card under
| 2%, compared to an airline rewards card that's more like
| 4%...
|
| I'm not even eligible for a Stripe account because a large
| part of my business could be called computer repair and that
| is explicitly disallowed.
| peanuty1 wrote:
| > What's the OP/your alternative?
|
| Square is one.
| https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-api
| viggity wrote:
| didn't stripe (maybe it was a competitor, idk) go to a Paypal
| conference and took like 2000lb blocks of ice with dollar
| bills frozen in them and drop them off in front of the
| convention center? And then posted signs everywhere to the
| effect "tired of paypal freezing your money?"
| viggity wrote:
| apparently it wasn't stripe, it was WePay.
|
| FWIW If you want to be able to quickly switch payment
| providers without stripe (or any provider) holding your
| customer's payment info hostage, you should consider using
| a PCI tokenization service like BasisTheory.com
| icebergonfire wrote:
| Without taking away from your point, deep in the Reddit
| comments the OP states Stripe put a hold on the account after
| billing the sale of a literal company truck through Stripe and
| not via selling their normal store merchandise.
|
| https://reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/wa1zob/_/ihyq7tl...
|
| As usual, there's always an undisclosed fact that changes the
| narrative and explains the ban. Whether this should trigger
| Stripe's scorched earth mechanisms is another matter.
| civilized wrote:
| Maybe there's more to the story, but executing transactions
| which do not conform to Stripe's fraud detection model is not
| an offense that should be punished.
| dachryn wrote:
| no the entire store account should not be blocked, at least
| not for a first offense, but I could understand that the
| transaction is blocked, and that it might that quite some
| time to figure out what is going on
| DuckyC wrote:
| I think the fact that a company vehicle was sold for the
| $3300 hardly matters.
| [deleted]
| wernercd wrote:
| > not at least without a detailed blog post / postmortem.
|
| Can they legally give that considering its, most likely,
| private customer information? If they give detailed information
| out in a "Detailed" post mortem... isn't that proof that they
| are an untrustworthy entity?
|
| Just seems to me this is a damned if you do, damned if you
| don't attitude against Stripe (or, any company in general that
| has a complaint but can't do a "detailed" public response
| because, well, that's private information... .. . )
| patmcc wrote:
| >>>but $3300 is a pretty ordinary amount for any retailer.
|
| Really? There are entire classes of retailers where that would
| be a truly exceptional event. I don't know if that's true of
| the OP (post removed), but if their average transaction is $27
| or something this would rightly trigger alarm bells. If they
| are in fact being stonewalled on support that's pretty
| inexcusable though.
| nsmog767 wrote:
| am I the only person here eagerly scrolling through the comments
| to see if "pc" chimes in??
| mkl wrote:
| Possibly. You can just check his comments to see that he hasn't
| as of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pc
| [deleted]
| whatisweb3 wrote:
| Hopefully making enough noise on HN and social media will help
| your case move quickly. That appears to be the only way to get a
| response these days.
|
| Maybe one day non-custodial and permissionless payment rails will
| prevent this situation, for those services that choose to use it.
| Shame that HN is so polarized about blockchain that they refuse
| to entertain the idea.
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| > Maybe one day non-custodial and permissionless payment rails
| will prevent this situation, for those services that choose to
| use it. Shame that HN is so polarized about blockchain that
| they refuse to entertain the idea.
|
| It's a shame that we've only figured out "pay $200 to the guy
| using a derelict coal plant to run the world's fanciest space
| heater" and "pay $200 to the guy who hoards the most of your
| 'currency'" then and not "non-custodial and permissionless
| payment rails" then.
| whatisweb3 wrote:
| Lol this comment reveals a lot of ignorance. My last
| transaction fee on Eth was in the range of $1, most of that
| value is burned and not sent to a miner, and anyone who wants
| to participate in protocol rewards can do so through
| delegation.
|
| PoS is not perfect but far better than current norm of "pay a
| billion dollar corporation a fixed fee and also give them
| total control of the world's payment rails."
| AdrianEGraphene wrote:
| AFAIK, there are no permissionless payment rail that do fiat->
| crypto payment processing. They all require intermediaries and
| presumably would run into similar issues.
|
| Crypto-> crypto would be a different story, but requires a more
| sophisticated buyer.
|
| I play in this space, so would definitely like to hear what
| you've got in mind.
| whatisweb3 wrote:
| Imagining either crypto to crypto, or a permissioned rollup
| handling crypto to fiat that lets the sequencer block a users
| address for KYC purposes, but user can still trustlessly
| withdraw funds to mainnet.
| negamax wrote:
| But what about the people who don't have social clout? I think
| for every person like this, there are 100s if not thousands
| who's money and accounts get locked away.
| whatisweb3 wrote:
| That's my point. A system where your funds are locked unless
| your complaint goes viral is a terrible system.
| noasaservice wrote:
| This is a *legal* issue,and not a shitcoin-solving issue.
| whatisweb3 wrote:
| Poor technical and legal frameworks for digital payment
| processors is how we have gotten to this point. Strict AML,
| KYC, copyright protection, and anti-adult requirements forces
| payment processors to err on the side of caution and deploy
| mass automated systems to flag and lock accounts that trigger
| the slightest internal alarm bells, even if this leads to
| some false positives and destroys a few small businesses
| along the way.
| factsaresacred wrote:
| The post was deleted by the subreddit moderators so I hope HN
| don't mind me reposting it here:
|
| > I used Stripe for about a year to run a small cell phone store
| in Denver, CO area. In the case of my business, I never had an
| issue processing my small payments for cell phones, ranging from
| a couple hundred dollars up to $1000. All of a sudden, we run a
| charge for $3300 because our primary processor in my business was
| down, and we had a large transaction to fulfill. Stripe flagged
| the transaction and is now holding the money from me for "at
| least 120 days"
|
| > It is one thing to say this is a red flag, fine... I hear
| you... no problem. a transaction multiple times the size... sure.
| I get it. However A normal payment processor would then query you
| for documents authorizing the charge, bank statements, financial
| statements, some sort of procedure to remedy the issue. Stripe
| provides NO SUCH METHOD TO RESOLVE these issues.
|
| > I am concerned because there are reports of Stripe continuing
| to add "30 days" to the reserve hold past the initial 120 days,
| indefinitely. One article detailed a hold that was surpassing its
| 240th day. Stripe is taking advantage of a lack of regulation in
| this space to steal small merchant's large transactions. They see
| a big, outlier transaction and lick their chops, hiding behind
| KYC and "Fraud prevention" To hold your money indefinitely.
|
| > You cannot call Stripe. They do not have a phone number. Their
| support page on their website has Phone call and messaging grayed
| out. You can only email. If you email, you get robots. Even in
| the same email thread, a different "agent" (with a different name
| and everything) answers each time with not prior knowledge of
| your history. There are no ticket numbers to your support
| request; nothing tracking it. The robots respond with what is
| quite obviously a template response.
|
| > If you do a little bit of research about this topic, you
| immediately see this is a prevailing issue. Reports of Stripe
| taking up to $31,000 are all over the internet! Again, Stripe
| gives no manner to remedy this. There is NO ONE you can call. NO
| ONE you can talk to. More disconcerting, it seems that anyone who
| posts about this issue on reddit gets downvoted and teamed up
| against by established Reddit accounts, that I have to imagine
| are owned by Stripe. These account have some established reddit
| history on them, mainly talking about coding in PERL. It's a
| little sus. In my case, I sent my EIN letter, Sales Tax Receipt,
| Articles of Org, Statement of Trade Name, Certificate of Good
| Standing, Bank Statements, Website links, Signed transaction
| receipts, and anything I could think of to Stripe to review. I
| just received robot-responses; never got anything cleared up.
|
| > I challenge reddit to connect me to a human being at Stripe
| that can tell me how to resolve the issue. I'm convinced It can't
| be done. This is a big problem and should be brought to the
| attention of small business owners, and regulators!
|
| > TL;DR : I used Stripe to process my business transactions. They
| saw a large transaction come through and used their twisted TOS
| to steal $3,000 from my small business. They use gray area
| contract loopholes to be able to hold your money from you
| indefinitely. While you lose out on your working capital and ROI,
| they collect free interest on your money; potentially never
| returning it.
| ellieh wrote:
| Does anyone have any suggestions of what to use instead? Lots of
| "don't use Stripe", but I'd love to know what the alternatives
| are!
| pier25 wrote:
| For a hobby project of mine I use Gumroad.
|
| The integration on my website is bad... But payments and
| payouts have been solid so far.
| quelltext wrote:
| https://help.gumroad.com/article/260-your-payout-settings-
| pa...
|
| Gumroad itself uses Stripe, it seems so if Stripe decides to
| hold funds it's likely Gumroad will just forward that
| experience to you.
| peanuty1 wrote:
| Square is one option.
| https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-api
| joshstrange wrote:
| So this seems like a good time to tell my Stripe story. Let me
| preface this by saying I attempted to move to a different card
| processor late last year/early this year and despite 100+ hours
| of coding to fully integrate with them (and add features that
| were missing compared to our Stripe integration) I had to drop
| them due to what can only be described as lies about their rates
| (yes, I should have gotten this in writing instead of just over
| the phone but I was naive). All that said I had <1 week to switch
| back to Stripe before preorders started for the event and it was
| a breeze. Stripe has it's problems but I still think they are the
| best game in town.
|
| Now for my Stripe issue. Around the time I dropped the other
| payment processor I bought some Stripe M2 readers (Part of
| "Stripe Terminal" for in-person payments). At the same time I
| purchased a "Stripe Terminal Test Card" to use in the test
| environment. They have a simulated reader but I always prefer to
| use the same hardware as production to get a better feel for how
| it all works.
|
| The readers arrived and so did the card but for some reason I
| could not get the card to read, I kept getting back an error code
| of "6" [0] telling me that the card could not be read. If I
| scanned a real card it would scan and then fail when trying to
| auth the payment (understandable, I was in the "test"
| environment) but to me this proved the reader was working. I did
| some testing in "live" and all my cards were read/charged without
| issue. I opened a ticket with Stripe on May 6th.
|
| I had a similar "new rep every message" as the person in this
| Reddit post and my ticket would often go days/weeks without
| response (other than me begging for help). I followed every
| single instruction they sent, I provided all the debug info they
| asked for, I shot 4+ videos of the issue, nothing. Around June
| 2nd (almost a month after starting this process) I complained on
| Twitter and Stripe Support reached out (this did nothing, it
| might have gotten me a useless reply on the ticket but no real
| help). A Stripe employee also reached out directly to me via DM
| and we started an email conversation resulting in them just
| sending me 5 Stripe Test Cards to see if maybe it was just my
| card that was broken. About the same time Stripe sent another M2
| reader and another Test Card (Note: in the interim I bought 16
| readers for my event and had tried multiple of them to no avail,
| I was pretty sure it wasn't a problem with the reader and told
| them as much).
|
| I got all the new hardware and recorded a long video of me
| testing 3 M2 readers and 5 Stripe Test cards in every combination
| 3 (readers) x 5 (cards) x 2 (methods, dip/tap). I used their
| sample app and their sample backend (a ruby app running in a
| docker container) just to rule out any of my code. Same error
| every single time.
|
| I reported my results to both the employee and my support ticket
| and got no help. Support didn't reply, the employee talked about
| sending me card they had on their desk that they knew worked but
| that conversation petered out and I didn't want to bug someone
| who was going out of their way to help me. 10+ days would go by
| and I'd beg and plead for help in my support ticket with no
| reply, this repeated multiple times.
|
| Finally, on July 25th, 3 days ago, almost 3 months after starting
| this journey, Stripe replied to my ticket:
|
| > We have figured out that some of our Terminal physical test
| card inventory did not work.
|
| No. Fucking. Shit. This is something I suggested about a million
| times. All my cards had the same serial/batch/something number on
| the back and I had speculated it could be a bad batch and asked
| them to send me an opened/used card that they knew worked and/or
| check the number on a working card, they ignored all of this.
|
| They sent me 3 replacement cards and they sit next to me right
| now on my desk, unopened. My event is in 2 days and I don't have
| the time/energy to test them right now. All my energy is on
| testing the full setup on production but I might lose my mind if
| these are broken as well. My curiosity just got the better of me
| and I opened a card and the numbers on the back are different so
| that gives me some hope (all 7 cards I got from Support/buying
| myself had the same number).
|
| This is only 1 instance of shitty Stripe support, I have 2 others
| that I won't get into right now. I still love their
| docs/sdk/dashboard but I really wish their support was better.
|
| [0] https://stripe.dev/stripe-terminal-
| ios/docs/Enums/SCPReaderD...
| edwinwee wrote:
| I work at Stripe and I'm terribly sorry for what happened here.
| I have a Terminal test card that I use and that I know works. I
| can overnight it to you so you have it before your event. Could
| you let me know your address at edwin@stripe.com (or DM me on
| twitter at @edwinwee)?
|
| We're investigating right now what happened here. I'd also like
| to dig into your other instances of shitty support--could you
| forward those to me?
| joshstrange wrote:
| I'll forward all instances to you. I have 3 cards from
| support that I haven't tested yet but look like they have a
| different batch number so I'm hoping they will work. I won't
| need them now since all my testing is happening in live but I
| appreciate the offer.
| shmde wrote:
| https://teddit.net/r/tifu/comments/wa230m/tifu_by_using_stri...
| ericpauley wrote:
| >You cannot call Stripe. They do not have a phone number.
|
| Not sure whether this person was specifically locked out or
| something, but I've had consistently good experience with
| Stripe's phone support. As they note email (and chat) are a joke,
| but phone reps are highly knowledgeable and have quickly resolved
| my issues.
| rahkiin wrote:
| According to the reddit thread, when your account is locked,
| the 'Chat' and 'Give me a call' options get grayed out.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| But is that, you know, true? The HN front page gives a
| stunning amount of credulity to unverified stories from
| random people on social media.
| rahkiin wrote:
| I do not know. I only state what the original author
| posted.
|
| Maybe someone is willing to create a Stripe account and
| trigger a block to test it.
|
| Edit: another thread 3 years ago mentions the same: "I
| tried to contact support by chat or phone, but it seems
| that when they suspend an acct, they block your ability to
| contact support by any method except by email..." [0]
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21031665
| anonymousab wrote:
| Stripe folks have confirmed that they will only allow
| certain support channels when certain situations come up
| (I'd imagine certain types of assumed fraud would merit
| async channels only, etc.).
|
| It's just a crazy coincidence that they also won't tell you
| the underlying truths to the situation that would let you
| understand why they aren't letting you call them. Surely
| they are reasonable and not just standard corpo tech
| negligent customer support. Surely.
| patio11 wrote:
| (I work for Stripe, and since many of my colleagues are currently
| sleeping, taking the liberty of saying this on their behalf.)
|
| We are looking into things.
|
| As someone who ran businesses for a long time myself, it would be
| very alarming to me if customers felt they were being ignored
| while repeatedly talking to people who work for us. If that ever
| happens, please bring in literally anyone at Stripe, inclusive of
| other Patrick. Our email addresses are often available through a
| quick search of HN; mine is (predictably) patio11@stripe.com if
| you need it.
|
| We don't comment publicly on individual customers. This is an
| important part of customer privacy and we're serious about it.
|
| Sometimes situations which result in external complaints are the
| result of a process failure, and in those cases we try to fix the
| instant case and improve processes in the future.
|
| Sometimes they are the result of a process operating correctly
| but coming to a result which someone did not enjoy. The record
| available to the process is often more detailed than the record
| available to the public Internet, and may include extremely
| relevant context.
| newfonewhodis wrote:
| > Sometimes they are the result of a process operating
| correctly but coming to a result which someone did not enjoy
|
| So much to unpack here but this is extremely patronizing
| ("we're not wrong, you just didn't like what we did). "process
| operating correctly" refers to holding a merchant's money with
| no reason communicated, and no way for them to get in touch
| with the company?
| TekMol wrote:
| As someone who is seeing the industry from the inside: How do
| you think about the option to settle all transactions instantly
| over the lightning network?
|
| Since lightning payments settle instantly, the problem of
| frozen funds would go away for good.
|
| Another problem that would go away is high fees. I was
| listening to the UpWork earnings call today and one question
| was what their biggest cost of revenue is. And they replied:
| Payments. And that thats the reason why they prefer enterprise
| customers over small businesses. Because those create less
| payment related costs.
|
| So lightning would get rid of two significant problems at once.
|
| Would we get some other problem in return?
| politician wrote:
| Payments over FedNow are required to settle within 8 seconds
| of the receiving FI being notified of the transaction.
| Launching next year, FedNow is positioned to replace ACH and
| wires and do most of the things that folks want lightning
| network / L2 / Zelle / Ripple and other RTP solutions to do,
| but for the entire USD-denominated market.
|
| FedNow also replaces ACH debit origination and its Good Funds
| Period with a Request to Pay architecture that IMO is far
| safer and has fewer edge cases and lacks the hilarious
| infinite loop in ACH debit exception handling.
|
| So, yeah, good question, sorry you're being downvoted.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| ceejayoz wrote:
| /u/patio11 is publicly _very_ skeptical of cryptocurrency.
| https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1536687513204625409
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| If you're 'on the inside' then you know much of the consumer
| benefit is the silent 'redistribution of wealth' in 'points.'
| Since there are 'fewer fees to the right people' in the
| lightning network, points probably don't make as much sense -
| so it's a non-starter to your primary customer.
|
| Also, disputing charges is a whole separate protocol for
| lightning that hasn't yet been considered. Or more
| accurately, is railed against as 'code is law' and 'not your
| keys not your crypto'
|
| So for all the fees you 'save,' lightning nets a
| significantly below 0.
|
| [Edit] Upwork is big enough to make their own gateway - the
| idea that they haven't is negligent.
| Crosseye_Jack wrote:
| What percentage of people who walk into a business or go
| online to complete a transaction are able to send their
| payment via the lightning network compared to the percentage
| of people who walk in to do a transaction via
| Visa/Mastercard/Etc?
|
| The issue is Card payments and the networks they use. Doesn't
| matter if lightning settles transactions instantly if the
| customer wants to pay with Visa and Visa allows funds claw
| back for ~180 days.
|
| Normally a stores merchant account is kept open, so if a
| transaction is charged back a month later (and the bank and
| visa aggree with the chargeback) the money can be recovered
| from future sales. If the stores merchant account is closed
| because of "reasons" the payment provider can either use the
| funds the store has yet to cash out from the the payment
| provider as "insurance" against chargebacks until the
| deadline passes (at which case its safe to cash out) or start
| invoicing the store you just told to GTFO as a merchant to
| try and get the money back and then go recovery paths which
| is much more a nightmare for payment providers.
|
| I'm not saying I agree with the polices, just that I
| understand why they are in place, the payment providers are
| just covering their own asses at the end of the day.
| TekMol wrote:
| At the moment, pretty much nobody is able to send payments
| via the lightning network.
|
| My question is about "what if".
|
| Would there be downsides?
|
| If the upsides outweigh the downsides, LN could slowly find
| its way into retail. Maybe by starting with some special
| use cases where speed, low fees, privacy or immutability
| are especially important.
| Crosseye_Jack wrote:
| Customers like the ability to charge back if the product
| is faulty, not as advertised, or the retailer goes under.
| Heck its one of the advertised bonuses of using a credit
| card for purchases, You are spending the banks money so
| you are better protected against fraud/retailer
| bankruptcy.
|
| Customers with outstanding orders are often on the bottom
| of the list of creditors who get paid back when a company
| goes bust and even the companies themselves will often
| say in their final messages to customers to speak to
| their card company and issue a charge back for
| outstanding orders.
| TekMol wrote:
| They like it, but are they willing to pay for it?
|
| The vendor needs to factor in the costs induced by
| Stripe. That's 3% fee _plus_ the danger of your account
| being frozen. How much is that? Maybe another 1%?
|
| So if the "price" to use Stripe is 4%, the vendor could
| offer their customers the same products for 2% less if
| they pay via lightning - and share the savings with their
| customers.
|
| Sounds like a good deal. I have bought something with my
| CC hundreds of times and never ever did a chargeback.
|
| On top of it, as a customer, I find credit cards annoying
| and scary. To get one, I have to get it physically
| delivered to my snail mail box. And everytime I pull that
| thing out, someone could photograph or memorize the
| numbers on it and cause me trouble.
| TomGullen wrote:
| Consumers like the idea of chargeback and other legal
| protections. Crypto advocates say that you can add middle
| organisations to offer this, but then we've gone full
| circle and really there is no advantage.
| rtlfe wrote:
| > Our email addresses are often available through a quick
| search of HN
|
| Your customer service strategy is really "go to a small
| internet forum that only some startup nerds know about and find
| my email address"?
| civilized wrote:
| Makes you wonder who the audience for the original comment
| really is.
| tyrust wrote:
| I doubt it's the general strategy. Patrick might be assuming
| that frequenters of HN are less likely to be bad actors and
| people that legitimately are slipping through the cracks.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Yes, in Stripe's case. That's the only way I've ever had a
| big issue successfully resolved. They empower their customer
| service team with over a dozen ways to say "sorry the system
| won't let me solve this" or "Your issue may be unique to you,
| but since my solution for somebody else's different issue
| wouldn't work for you, I have no power to do anything".
| civilized wrote:
| Corporate process improvement is not an excuse for treating
| people badly. An individual human who treats people badly is
| not allowed to say "well I deal with a lot of people and I need
| algorithms and sometimes my algorithms don't work so I'm doing
| my best to improve them". Corporations should not get a pass
| because they need cheap processes that "scale" to maintain
| their profit margins.
|
| This is the perpetual moral hazard that we constantly see at
| all big tech firms. These firms promised fantastical profit
| margins, but only on the condition of scaling at very low cost.
| What doesn't scale at very low cost? Customer service. That's
| why you're all so awful at it.
|
| And don't come back with your satisfaction metrics from
| customers you haven't screwed. Your job is to do right by the
| customers who aren't convenient for you. Just like it's an
| insurance company's job to pay out to the tiny minority of
| claimants. It doesn't matter one bit if the company has a great
| web site or API that everyone loves. The true moral nature of
| your company is revealed by how you treat the customers who
| need you to do right by them.
| shepardrtc wrote:
| I think this negativity is uncalled for. They said that they
| do their best, sometimes there are mistakes on their end that
| they try to fix, and sometimes the person complaining is
| lying or leaving out details that would explain the
| situation. If you've ever dealt with people, you would know
| that they often "forget" things or downplay things that would
| make them look bad.
| civilized wrote:
| You're bringing negativity as well. Just applying it to the
| smaller, weaker party.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I read OP's reply as a generic criticism about companies
| that scale beyond their ability to provide sufficient
| customer support, not a specific criticism of patio11.
| Silicon Valley is full of companies that scale beyond their
| competence and ability to operate properly: it's
| practically a requirement of the "growth at all costs"
| mentality. I would argue that if you cannot handle dealing
| with customers without AI and automation with many false
| positives, then you have no business scaling further until
| you can. I don't know if this is the particular case for
| Stripe since I'm not a customer, but we can all see this
| behavior across the industry.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| I think this criticism is called for. The customer tried
| asking them nicely and it sounds like they did not try very
| hard to fix it -- which is an experience I can empathize
| with 100 times over. If you've ever dealt with companies,
| you know that they often have policies and procedures that
| intentionally screw customers and they only back off if it
| blows up publicly. Because they can. Our accountability
| mechanisms suck.
| humanistbot wrote:
| When so much money is at stake, the negativity is called
| for. Stripe is not neutral here. They have leverage and
| power over their merchants in these situations.
| hassancf wrote:
| Perfect
| boringg wrote:
| Disagree but a morally commendable position.
| simplMath10 wrote:
| The low cost part was to intentionally offer worse support
| and increase profit for employees.
|
| Corporations are contemporary churches, soaking up public
| wealth and agency, ultimately serving the disciples of the
| church before the public in exchange.
|
| They're almost a Ponzi scheme; customer resources go in. None
| there for the customer when they come to collect.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Also: Stripe publicly emphasized the possibility that their
| customer might be a dirty rotten liar.
|
| I feel it is only fair to point out that Stripe might be a
| dirty rotten liar, too.
| graeme wrote:
| It turns out the poster did, in fact, omit extremely
| material info from their original post. They sold a used
| company van via credit card via their stripe account:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32264886
|
| This is not something the business sells, and a huge
| chargeback risk
| axus wrote:
| Isn't the obviously correct behavior by Stripe to suspend
| that transaction, without interrupting others? Clearly
| they are able to identify transactions on a case-by-case
| basis.
| graeme wrote:
| I read their account. They only complain of Stripe
| holding "the" money, from the car. Did they say Stripe
| locked their account or did any other restrictions?
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/wa1zob/do
| nt_...
|
| I read a few of their comments their complain seems to be
| about the $3000 and needing to wait 120 days to get it.
|
| They also say you can't call, but at least for me I'm
| able to call Stripe here:
| https://support.stripe.com/?contact=true
| ciabattabread wrote:
| From elsewhere in this page:
|
| > I used Stripe for about a year to run a small cell phone
| store in Denver, CO area. [1]
|
| > We sold a cheap van in the company name. [2]
|
| Yeah, that explains how they arrived in Stripe jail.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32261868#32264335
|
| [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/wa1zob/
| comme...
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| > I work for Stripe
|
| Bit of an understatement, right?
| sulam wrote:
| He is not Patrick Collison.
|
| https://www.kalzumeus.com/
| talideon wrote:
| Wrong Patrick: kalzumeus is Patrick McKenzie. Patrick
| Collison's site is patrickcollison.com, and he's 'pc' on
| Hacker News.
| antman wrote:
| Customers are publicly asking for your answers for your what in
| their opinion is an ill conceived and/or villainous process.
| Not answering claiming that it violates your privacy process
| from which they specifically exempted themselves could also be
| considered even more ill conceived/villainous.
|
| They are waiting for your answers, it is a public matter as per
| your clients repeated requests, it affects more people, money
| is involved, we are all waiting for your resolution and future
| mitigation actions. Or rebuttal ofcourse.
| kalkin wrote:
| If I was a customer and Stripe (or any other company) started
| releasing private correspondence and financial details
| publicly because someone on the internet claiming to be me
| complained about the company, and the company took that as
| implicitly waiving any privacy obligations, I'd be pretty
| upset. If they said that the prurient interest of their other
| customers in the details was part of their decision I'd be
| even more upset!
| balentio wrote:
| Don't worry. I made your correspondence public concerning my
| account from last year so people can see how you handle
| complaints.
| baggachipz wrote:
| Maybe if the company had some way, any way at all, to reach an
| actual human being, this wouldn't be a constantly repeated
| problem on HN and elsewhere.
| patio11 wrote:
| As I have observed in other contexts (
| https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1463749947858165761 ),
| many people who say "Ugh, I cannot reach a real human" have
| in fact spoken to several humans, repeatedly and at length,
| and are imprecisely stating their desire to speak to a person
| who would agree with their view of the facts and swiftly
| enact the resolution that they prefer.
|
| We offer (human-powered, somewhat obviously?) support via a
| variety of methods 24/7; time for us to reply to email is
| generally a few minutes. Could we do this better? Yes, and I
| hope we continue doing it better; if anyone ever has an
| interaction where we don't meet the bar please flag to us.
| westonplatter0 wrote:
| I can attest to this.
|
| The small company I was working for got card tested
| (scammers use hundreds of stolen cards to see if they
| work). I called customer support and talked with a human on
| a Friday night at 8pm for 15 minutes about our options. 2-3
| days later, I chatted with someone from the fraud team.
|
| I was surprised by the high touch service even though
| didn't have a lot of volume (new account w/ less than $10k
| of transactions).
| ryandrake wrote:
| I'm not a Stripe customer, but I've often ended calls with
| other companies' human tech support thinking "wow, I wish I
| could talk to a human." Not because they didn't take my
| side, but because I might as well have been talking to a
| chatbot. Many companies' tier 1 support can't go off
| script, can't offer creative solutions that are even
| slightly off the rails, can't make exceptions, can't apply
| human reason or good judgment, can't update fields in their
| screens that are read-only... they are basically IVR
| systems that eat lunch. So I can emphasize with the feeling
| that customers are always interacting with an API.
| baggachipz wrote:
| "Am I so out of touch? No, it's the customers who are
| wrong."
| civilized wrote:
| > imprecisely stating their desire to speak to a person who
| would agree with their view of the facts and swiftly enact
| the resolution that they prefer.
|
| Wow, one reply in and we're already seeing open contempt
| for this type of troublesome customer. What nerve,
| expecting a payment processor to promptly process payments
| and make funds accessible to the account holder.
|
| This reply is going to look monumentally bad if the
| customer ends up being right about how they were treated.
| austenallred wrote:
| The Reddit thread shows that OP has interacted with
| Stripe through Twitter DMs at a minimum.
| wernercd wrote:
| > This reply is going to look monumentally bad if the
| customer ends up being right about how they were treated.
|
| And will you say the opposite when the opposite is true?
| Other comments mention facts about how the OP tried to do
| something outside of normal and the response is expected
| for "abnormal" behavior on an account.
|
| Anger against companies is one thing... but will you
| defend them when it turns out the company is in the right
| or is this only a one sided comment?
| ziddoap wrote:
| In this specific case, the OP claims that the call and chat
| options are greyed out, leaving only e-mail and social
| media. E-mail, they claim, is bot responses only.
|
| While I understand you can't comment on the specifics of
| this case, can you speak generally about whether or not
| disabling the phone/chat support buttons is a part of some
| standard process?
| patio11 wrote:
| Speaking generally, chat and phone support are designed
| to provide immediate round-the-clock service to a wide
| range of issues but not literally every type of issue
| that a financial institution has to be able to deal with.
|
| Sometimes, a financial institution might only be able,
| due to staffing or other considerations, to deal with you
| asynchronously in writing, perhaps from e.g. a group of
| professionals who are not as numerous as front-line user
| operations.
| sph wrote:
| This is a roundabout non-answer that doesn't explain why
| chat and phone support were/are greyed out.
|
| Are you just trying to say "we're so short staffed,
| there's no one to answer your messages, let alone your
| calls?"
| whiddershins wrote:
| What he is saying is that in the instance of a fraud
| concern, they don't have people who can talk about it
| available 24/7.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| This comment should make every Stripe customer run.
|
| You've build up an incredible amount of kudos with your
| comments and blog posts over the last decade+ here and are
| willing to burn it for a corporation in a moment? Earning
| trust takes a long time, losing trust only takes the blink
| of an eye.
| snovv_crash wrote:
| The guy tried to use a cellphone shop account to sell a
| used van via credit card. If I was Stripe I'd be holding
| the money until the chargeback period was over too.
| dazbradbury wrote:
| I only have one recurring bug bear that seems trivial for
| Stripe to solve:
|
| Is there a reason you can't get ARN/STAN refund codes via the
| Stripe API?
|
| I have never been able to get an answer to that.
| vilfredoparet0 wrote:
| A quote from Patrick Collison from one of the last "HN support
| threads":
|
| "We actually have an ongoing project to reduce the occurrence of
| these mistaken rejections by 90% by the end of this year. I think
| we'll succeed at it. (They're already down 50% since earlier this
| year.)"
|
| At this point it is obvious that he/his PR staff are lying.
|
| The only question is: What are some good Stripe alternatives?
| peanuty1 wrote:
| > What are some good Stripe alternatives?
|
| Square is one.
| https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-api
| MauranKilom wrote:
| > At this point it is obvious that he/his PR staff are lying.
|
| Without taking any stance on the problem at hand: How does an
| N=1 sample make it "obvious" that a 50% or 90% reduction has
| not taken place?
| FpUser wrote:
| Maybe bunch of small claim court cases could straighten them out?
| If Stripe did something like that to me I would certainly pursue
| this. My own experience is - I have a web store that sells my
| software products (we use both PayPal and Stripe) for many years.
| Size of transaction ranges from $10 up to $7000 (as far as I
| remember) So far there were no any significand holds / delays.
| schnebbau wrote:
| As Stripe keeps growing this seems to be a more recurring
| problem, as it seems to be with most companies that eventually
| get too big to care about the little guy.
|
| Which leads to my question: is there a smaller alternative
| similar to the Stripe of five years ago which might appreciate
| our business more?
| Aeolun wrote:
| And hopefully stays small. And does processing for any country,
| not just 3 states in the US :/
| pixiemaster wrote:
| ,,Too Big To Care"
| vxxzy wrote:
| PastePay is a great alt to Stripe. Check them out
| https://www.pastepay.com. I posted this elsewhere in this
| comment section. PastePay is a "smaller service". It is more
| customer focused than Stripe.
| JonathanBeuys wrote:
| How much does Stripe charge for this service?
|
| Say you are a vendor who sells 1000 products a month for $100
| each. So $100,000 in monthly revenue, split into 1000 payments.
|
| How much would you pay to Stripe per month?
|
| And how quickly can you move incoming payments away from Stripe?
| joshstrange wrote:
| Unless you have a bulk deal (which you won't even at
| 1.2M/annual, though you are close IIRC) you are paying 2.9% +
| $0.30 (also assuming you aren't using any extras).
|
| > How much would you pay to Stripe per month?
|
| So ($100,000 * 0.029) + (1000 * $0.30) = $3,200 / mo
|
| > And how quickly can you move incoming payments away from
| Stripe?
|
| Not an easy question. Depends a lot on your payment stack and
| how you implemented Stripe. I can say that for myself it took
| ~100 hours to fully move everything over (both online and in-
| person payment system) as a solo dev. I ended up moving back to
| Stripe because the alternatives suck even more, or at least the
| one I picked.
| peanuty1 wrote:
| > I ended up moving back to Stripe because the alternatives
| suck even more, or at least the one I picked.
|
| Did you try Square?
| https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-api
| [deleted]
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Count to three for someone from Stripe appearing here,
| apologizing and fixing the issue.
| sys42590 wrote:
| Well, fixing this specific case does not equal to fixing the
| issue in general.
|
| The morale of the story is that you should not behave like
| Google if you aren't as big as Google...
| wonderbore wrote:
| > you should not behave like Google
|
| I'd end it there.
| Crosseye_Jack wrote:
| Yup, how many times have we seen it here on HN alone where
| someone has posted "Google nuked us from the Play store and
| won't talk to us about it" only to be returned after the
| post hit the front page?
|
| People shouldn't have to go viral on social media to get
| decent customer service just because "computer says no."
| whiddershins wrote:
| It's interesting that most are taking the Reddit post at face
| value, even though if the transaction were by a fraudster, the
| fraudster would probably have no compunction about lying on the
| internet.
| thallium205 wrote:
| It's called placing a reserve on the account and it is something
| any payment processor will do to a merchant account.
| joshmanders wrote:
| A reserve is to make sure that the funds are there to cover the
| check in the event it may bounce. Checks do not take 120+ days
| to complete.
| thallium205 wrote:
| Credit card chargebacks can be initiated a half a year or
| more after a transaction has occured so yes, the reserve is
| in place to reduce the risk of losing money of the merchant
| bank from this event.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Sure, and OP understands that. But, there's apparently no
| effective resolution process, especially one involving a human.
|
| What would you suggest the OP do to resolve their issue?
| [deleted]
| thallium205 wrote:
| There is no "resolution" to the situation. His account has a
| reserve on it and it may stay there for the entire lifetime
| of the account. He has to just deal with it.
| mission_failed wrote:
| Yes banks regularly seize money from accounts for hundreds of
| days and refuse to discuss it with paying customers /s
| thallium205 wrote:
| Actually, they do. And they will hold reserves on accounts
| for many months to over a year if they suspect it may be
| fraud. The acquiring bank does this because the risk of a
| chargeback is high and their ability to recoup the funds may
| be diminished with a small account.
|
| I've been in high risk merchant processing for almost a
| decade. The merchant may _never_ get the money back until
| they close the account completely and wait half a year for a
| check in the mail.
| Tomte wrote:
| Welcome to the Stripe support forum! A founder will be here
| momentarily.
| psyc wrote:
| Or the Content & Communications guy.
| username_my1 wrote:
| any day now
| jeroenhd wrote:
| You're not wrong:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32263901
| upupandup wrote:
| Which country can I incorporate in so I can pay the least
| amount of taxes by using Stripe? Gibraltar?
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