[HN Gopher] Stripe is PayPal circa 2010
___________________________________________________________________
Stripe is PayPal circa 2010
Author : qualudeheart
Score : 413 points
Date : 2022-10-09 04:30 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (learnjsthehardway.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (learnjsthehardway.com)
| nailer wrote:
| > if Stripe only compared the IP address GeoIP to Zip codes they
| could block 90% of them
|
| Personally I found geoblocking the Philippines massively reduces
| card fraud. I'm content to lose any legitimate traffic from the
| country in return.
| super256 wrote:
| You could force 3ds authentication for _every_ charge. Works in
| Europe, as SDA is mandatory. Also supported with like >98% of
| customers from NA. Just very few banks do not support 3ds.
| smakosh wrote:
| We actually got our fees refunded due to some fraudulent
| transactions in our marketplace which initially Stripe refused to
| refund
| BrainVirus wrote:
| The article is full of misrepresentations, some of which were
| already pointed out. One I have to point out myself:
|
| _" >People really, really, hate Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. So
| much so that they will refuse to give my small business money if
| it goes through Paypal on the off chance that those two guys
| might get some of it."_
|
| This looks like pure spin. I don't know of anyone who refuses to
| use PayPal because of this reason. (Thiel and Musk are not
| running the company anymore.) I know a lot of people who refuse
| to use PayPal because it has some kind of directive to ban people
| for wrongthink. There are countless instances documented on
| ReclaimTheNet.org [1], and those are just the ones involving
| people of notoriety.
|
| [1] - https://reclaimthenet.org/page/2/?s=paypal
|
| There is literally a campaign of people closing PayPal accounts
| in protest of company's behavior right now. (That $2,500 fine
| proposal was the last straw.) Guess what? Many people see
| "errors" when they try to close an account. Dark patterns
| everywhere.
|
| In short, if you choose to use PayPal as a sole payment method
| for your business, know that you are alienating a lot of
| potential customers.
| dmix wrote:
| The Thiel and Musk thing is bizarre, I've never heard of anyone
| being worried about that.
|
| eBay bought Paypal in the 'Paypal Mafia' two decades ago in
| 2002 which is when most of them cashed out their stock. I
| highly, highly doubt their founder stock is still in any way
| connected to the various corporate iterations of Paypal that
| were sold and resold.
|
| Even 10 years ago this would be a silly thing to be concerned
| about. Paypal has enough real problems anyway.
| amelius wrote:
| Except they have better CSS.
| nicgrev103 wrote:
| I mainly use stripe because they have significantly lower
| transaction fees. 1.4% +20p vs 2.9% +30p UK
| dangrossman wrote:
| I use a merchant account because it has significantly lower
| transaction fees, as low as 0.05% vs 2.9% for debit and check
| cards for example.
| dom96 wrote:
| So what's a better alternative to PayPal and Stripe? Plaid?
| Square? Do these even offer the same services?
| lucb1e wrote:
| Liberapay was the smoothest payment experience I ever had, but
| I don't know if you have to be a non-profit to be listed there
| or something.
|
| Other than that, I always appreciate when one can simply fall
| back to a bank transfer, then I can choose to just give them
| 100% of the money without risk to either party (no magic fraud
| detection, no cut going to paypal) at the cost of waiting a few
| days for the payment to be confirmed. So basically, just post
| your IBAN on your website please and offer to tick that as a
| payment option. No third party needed besides the bank account
| that you already need for running a business.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| There's no real API (certainly within the USA) for using bank
| transfers and being told that a payment has completed (even
| worse, most of the bank transfers are far from instant). So
| while this can work for a donation model, where the
| individual payments are not connected with access to services
| or goood, it really doesn't work where you (the provider of
| said services or goods) need to know that the payment has
| completed.
| lucb1e wrote:
| > There's no real API (certainly within the USA) for using
| bank transfers and being told that a payment has completed
|
| As a consumer, I can just download the transaction list as
| CSV. There doesn't really need to be a standard API if it
| takes 5 minutes to map your bank's fields in your favorite
| scripting language. For business accounts, I'm presuming
| this will be similar, if not better because they would more
| frequently actually use it.
|
| Even including thorough testing, it should be a few hours
| of work, and for that you can save whatever cut third
| parties would otherwise take before it lands in your bank
| account, plus the consumer doesn't need to deal with fraud
| shenanigans that might trip incorrectly.
|
| > even worse, most of the bank transfers are far from
| instant
|
| Yes, I mentioned that as a downside and it really is one,
| but for anything but food delivery I'm quite likely to
| choose this option. The anti-fraud on other methods, as
| someone frequently working across borders and with uBlock
| and such installed, just makes it impossible or annoyingly
| hard to pay too often otherwise. Plus, I don't _want_ to
| give paypal more money if that choice is available to me.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I make my income from people buying software from me.
| After they've paid, their expectation is that they will
| get a link that they can follow to download the software.
|
| This is not possible with US-style bank transfers at this
| time.
| dubcanada wrote:
| I'd honestly prefer some sort of a not for profit organization
| running them (like Canada's eTransfer with some additions,
| Europes bank to bank payments, etc). Anytime money is involving
| it ends up resulting in laundering money, fraud, stealing
| money, high transaction fees, or anything else.
|
| Like SWIFT but faster and not $25.
| aliqot wrote:
| I want something completely unrealistic- a company that does
| one thing and doesn't aspire to do more. No extra add ons 2
| years in, no extra services, just do payments.
|
| Most of the conventional merchant services platforms do this,
| but they lack all of the modern-web polish that stripe and
| paypal and square have. They will happily take your volume on
| a cost-plus basis if you can handle the absolutely disgusting
| 1998 web presence and lack of docs, and often the antiquated
| API's that use SOAP and XML.
|
| They're great. They don't change. All payments API's are
| shit, but one that is predictably shit and doesn't change
| once you've dealt with the shit is a quasi-meta-good thing as
| bad as that sounds. You have a person you can speak to, they
| know you on a first name basis, and they do a single thing-
| facilitate your ability to process payments.
| analog31 wrote:
| I always keep an eye out, and haven't yet found an alternative
| to PP. My situation is that I sell a hardware gadget, and run
| my business from a passive web page. PP lets me create forms
| that link to their website, so they actually handle the
| transaction themselves. Most of the other services seem to
| start with: "Here's a sample of the code that you need to have
| running on your server."
|
| This liberates me from running a web server, having my own URL,
| or doing any kind of coding. I love coding, and do it all the
| time by day, but it would add a layer of complexity to my
| business that I don't need.
|
| PP has worked fine for me, but they always say that you should
| have a backup.
| coob wrote:
| Stripe only requires you to drop some JavaScript on your
| page...
| JonoBB wrote:
| The one part of this article that I totally agree with is how
| terrible the API integration has become. In the early days,
| Stripe sold itself on a few things, one of which was the
| simplicity of integration. Since the whole PaymentIntents and
| SetupIntents introduction (along with the documentation fiasco
| that happened at the same time), integrating with Stripe is
| something like PayPal from 10 years ago. Its shit.
|
| PaymentIntents workflow (including the necessity to listen for
| webhooks) deserves a special place in hell. Its like they decided
| to copy Paypal IPN.
|
| I have used, recommended and intgrated Stripe to multiple
| businesses over the years (generating hundreds of US$ millions).
| For the past 2 years or so, I have migrated most of them away
| from Stripe, and any new integrations are done through other
| payment processors.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I found Stripe API really well organized and thought out.
| Everything is crisp and explained well. It is complex not
| because of bad design choices, but because payments, especially
| subscriptions are complex. I've integrated both payonce and
| subscription payments, takes a lot of effort but that's not
| Stripe's fault. Payments are insanely complicated and I am
| actually shocked that Stripe makes all of this possible.
| They've really tried to make it the best posssible API. It
| reeks of quality. I would rather have full control than to
| obscure everything under the rug to make it easy.
|
| I don't get the complaints here. Yea, it is hard to write
| payments workflows. Learn to properly organize your backend to
| account for all edge cases. Use stripe test clocks. Use mock
| objects and stripe CLI. Everything has been handed to you on a
| silver platter by Stripe IMO.
| echelon wrote:
| I feel this comment.
|
| I'm working though Stripe integration for the first time. It's
| one of the worst APIs I've ever dealt with.
|
| I couldn't find a single place advising which webhooks to
| listen to - or what their payloads should be - for simple
| subscription behavior. It's actually inconsistent in places.
|
| They built and accrued all of this complex billing behavior for
| all of these incredible upmarket needs, and in the meantime
| they forgot about the simple cases.
|
| I almost used PayPal or Square. Perhaps I should have.
|
| Stripe seems to have moved on to upmarket.
| koromak wrote:
| I was lead to believe a stripe API integration would take
| maybe a month of my time, for a subscription based service.
|
| Genuinely 3 months of development, with more roadblocks than
| I could have ever imagined.
| jwr wrote:
| > I'm working though Stripe integration for the first time.
| It's one of the worst APIs I've ever dealt with.
|
| Braintree user here, have I got news for you. I regularly
| have to waste weeks of developer time on payment processing.
| The documentation is terrible and fragmented, some things are
| not explained anywhere, support response times hover around
| two weeks (I'm not kidding), and the canned support responses
| rarely fit my use case, so there's always a back-and-forth.
|
| This would all be fine if I could just get it done once, but
| the thing rears its head regularly, what with the newer PSD2
| regulations or something else.
|
| As an example, after having done all the 3DS2 integration
| work (well, it was closer to re-work, as extensive changes
| were required), Braintree now tells me that 3DS1 is being
| deprecated (fine) and some of my transactions are 3DS1. Well,
| which ones, and WHY? I have no idea. I asked support on Sep
| 27, that was 12 days ago, no answer.
|
| I looked at Stripe and had a really hard time understanding
| how I can fit my subscription SaaS into it. I think if you
| fit the simplest common use case and you're willing to
| outsource everything, Stripe could be simple to use. If you
| want to be independent in any way, or want to maintain the
| relation to the customer yourself, things quickly get
| difficult. But the real reason why I can't even consider
| Stripe is multiple currencies: I want to settle in three
| currencies (including USD), and Stripe will only settle in
| USD to a bank account based in the US. Good luck getting a US
| bank account if you are an EU small business. Also, pricing
| looks reasonable at a first glance, until you notice the
| currency conversion fees and the extra "billing" fee. In my
| specific case I would end up at about 5.4%.
| kweks wrote:
| You might find https://www.airwallex.com useful for your
| multi currency needs. Not related to them, simply a happy
| user.
| fiznool wrote:
| On the specific point about getting a US bank account in
| the EU. I'm in the UK and have used Wise [1] (nee
| Transferwise) to set up a 'virtual' US bank account. You
| get a US account number to send to your client / plug into
| Stripe, and the funds are paid into the Wise account, which
| you can then transfer into your home currency account at
| your leisure. It's worked really well for me and the fees
| are very reasonable.
|
| [1] https://wise.com/
| martinald wrote:
| Echo this, works really well. Saves many many thousands a
| month sending Stripe -> Wise US "virtual" account -> UK
| bank account vs Stripe -> UK bank account.
|
| Stripe's forex fees are horrendous. Wise charges <0.5%,
| Stripe >3%. The spread here is similar to the credit card
| charge in the first place!
| paraboul wrote:
| PaymentIntents and webhooks are required because of SCA (3d
| secure) and other type of payments flow (Apple pay, Google pay
| or just Stripe Checkout) where the user might be redirected to
| some external services leading to the capture being validated
| asynchronously.
| daveoc64 wrote:
| I have used many other payment providers (in the UK) that
| deal with 3D Secure (and have done for decades), there's
| nothing about 3DS that requires things to be asynchronous.
|
| I am currently involved in a project to add Stripe support to
| a product, and it's a lot more complicated to set up a simple
| payment than other APIs on the market.
|
| From everything I'd heard about Stripe, I thought the API
| would be really simple, but it's not.
| paraboul wrote:
| I'm not an expert dealing with PSP, but situations where a
| payment is validated through a "return to merchant URL" is
| risky and could lead to payment being captured without the
| merchant being notified.
|
| Stripe abstracts away all the complexity having to deal
| with dozens of payments methods behind this single
| PaymentIntent API, which let you query the status of a
| payment at anytime (and webhooks are just a way to listen
| for updates in realtime).
| fcsp wrote:
| When I had to integrate the new intents APIs back when SCA
| launched it seemed pretty clear to me that they tried to
| come up with an API that covers many use cases (relatively)
| uniformly but therefore coming at the cost of a huge
| complexity boost over ther initial "charge a credit card"
| experience, which, combined with hugely lacking docs on
| some corner cases we encountered, seemed like a pretty poor
| decision to me based on what made them useful in the first
| place when they launched. As things stand I would look
| elsewhere now for integrating payments
| danenania wrote:
| Yes, to be fair to Stripe I think much of this is domain
| complexity that there are no easy answers for.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| What are the other payment processors that you prefer now?
| blobbers wrote:
| The heresy of claiming the golden boys of YC, the Collison bros.
| could be running an evil company with a bad product! I jest I
| jest.
|
| ... I appreciate that the author is willing to write something
| counter to the narrative!
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| I switched a site from WorldPay (hey remember those guys) to
| Stripe not long ago.
|
| Way lower charges. Way more finicky to integrate and yes the
| documentation is API reference not 'tutorial'. 100% agree about
| the weird error cases (to the extent I think I've still not
| handled them all) and the asynchronous stuff (which I kind of
| understand but also hate).
|
| Fortunately it's a business model where chargebacks are extremely
| unlikely so that's not affected us.
| culiao wrote:
| Overall, are you happy with the switch?
| augasur wrote:
| Has anyone tried Paddle[1] both by integration and customer
| support?
|
| I have been looking at it for my future projects for quite some
| time.
|
| Fees seems to be a bit higher, but it also has both CC and PayPal
| integrations and can take care of the taxes.
|
| [1] https://www.paddle.com
| fiznool wrote:
| Not tried, but also researched thoroughly. The main difference
| as a 'Merchant of Record' is that they are effectively
| resellers of your product, and pay you a (majority) cut on all
| sales. As you mention, one of the big attractions for me is the
| fact they take care of local taxation laws - as a UK based
| seller I would be on the hook for calculating and charging VAT
| in all countries that I sell to, which is a massive headache /
| pain in the arse to get right. Much like the App Store, Paddle
| removes all of that, as a MoR they are your only 'customer'
| from an accountancy point of view.
|
| Of course, one of the big drawbacks here is conceding control
| of a critical part of your infrastructure to another
| organisation. Better hope they don't hell ban you, or you'll be
| totally screwed. But that seems to be an issue with whoever you
| choose.
| blantonl wrote:
| This is a maddening writeup to read, only because for developers
| and business owners the single most important part of our
| businesses, receiving money from paying customers, is also the
| most excruciating, arbitrary, and frustrating part of our
| businesses as well. Stripe was "supposed" to fix this. But as we
| all know, banking and payments is _hard_.
|
| I run a nice successful business where premium subscriptions are
| my primary revenue model, and I as well relied on Paypal for
| years as my payment card processor. Some notes about my
| experiences over the past 20 years
|
| 1) The Paypal hell-ban thing is real. I had a handful of
| customers open support tickets monthly with me and indicate no
| matter what they did they could not successfully send us a credit
| card payment using Paypal as our payment processor. Paypal just
| says "Nope" and that's it. For all of the customer's payment
| methods.
|
| 2) It's true, there is a subset of people in this world that
| absolute loath Paypal and will open support tickets telling you
| so, which means there's a lot more of those people out there that
| just bail.
|
| 3) A few years ago I transitioned to Braintree payments as my
| primary credit card processor since I wanted to resolve #2 and
| just provide a simple hosted credit card form. Surprisingly, the
| transition was pretty easy, the APIs and webhooks were documented
| nicely, there were libraries available, and it didn't take me
| long at all to get up and running quickly. The onboarding process
| was pretty onerous (you'd think I was taking out a 10 million
| dollar mortage on a vacation home) but once we got going
| everything has been super smooth. Highly recommend Braintree.
|
| 4) I left our existing Paypal integration in place, and
| _shockingly_ almost 25% of my transactions still come from people
| who deliberately click on and decide to use Paypal in place of
| just a simple "enter your credit card information" form.
|
| I've never run into freezes, or some of the other nightmares seen
| out there, but definitely payments even in this day and time can
| be maddeningly frustrating. And there's always chargebacks and
| some of my favorite customer "excuses" for demands for refunds
| etc. Like:
|
| 1) "My 5 year old son signed up for an account on your service
| and purchased a premium subscription, please provide a refund
| immediately" - transaction happened at 2am local to the customer
| and you've got to provide your credit card CVV.
|
| 2) Customer purchases a 2 year premium subscription and then
| opens a support ticket and demands a refund because "I'm not
| quite sure what this is" - meanwhile they could have purchased a
| 6 month subscription to try it out just fine. A surprising number
| of people will just bulldoze through and buy the most expensive
| option and then have buyers remorse.
|
| 3) "The browser autofilled everything and submitted the payment
| without my involvement whatsoever" - and then demand a refund.
| Never mind customer has to literally click the "Pay Now" button.
|
| 4) And of course the fraudulent chargebacks. They'll open support
| tickets and correspond with you and demand refunds and then
| charge it back as an unauthorized fraudulent charge. Maddening.
|
| 5) Various other crazy excuses for demanding refunds or charging
| back something instead of just outright saying "this isn't what I
| expected for xxx reason" - they'll throw spouses, kids,
| criminals, everything under the bus instead of themselves. It's
| wild.
| jwr wrote:
| Braintree customer here (subscriptions). I'm surprised you
| found their APIs well documented, I have a terrible time every
| time I have to revisit the integration, which I have to do
| every (roughly) year or so. The whole 3DS2 migration in
| particular was very poorly handled, with documentation that had
| nothing to do with my use case.
|
| One more thing which I'm not sure you ran into: Braintree will
| eventually, at an arbitrary moment that you cannot predict or
| plan for, block all of your incoming funds and begin an audit.
| That audit can take anywhere from around a week to multiple
| weeks, during which time things will appear normal to your
| customers, but no funds will be disbursed to you. They will
| request various documents from you, some of which will feel
| somewhat invasive. From what I understand, this is routine
| procedure, usually tied to your monthly billing amounts, but
| could be triggered by other factors as well (unknown).
|
| So, it's better to make sure the business can handle a several
| week long suspension in disbursements.
| Daneel_ wrote:
| I'm in that 25%. The fewer people I have to give my card
| details to, the better. It also saves me remembering/typing in
| the details every time since I just need to use my password
| manager to log into paypal and then I'm good.
| faitswulff wrote:
| > A few years ago I transitioned to Braintree payments as my
| primary credit card processor
|
| IIRC Braintree is owned by PayPal, so I'm curious when to
| choose PayPal vs Braintree?
| chalst wrote:
| Paypal is more expensive.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Only for payments above a certain level. Many (most?) of my
| income comes from payments of US$1, and Braintree's fee
| structure for that (2.59% plus !!! _$0.49_ !!! per
| transaction) is untenable.
| chalst wrote:
| > I left our existing Paypal integration in place, and
| shockingly almost 25% of my transactions still come from people
| who deliberately click on and decide to use Paypal in place of
| just a simple "enter your credit card information" form.
|
| European here, but perhaps my experience is relevant: for
| nearly all the online credit-card processors, this step will
| require push-TAN and will fail for me. A fair proportion of
| websites are buggy and will not gracefully recover the session
| after the processor reports failure. Paypal, in contrast, has
| always been unproblematic.
|
| I'm patient and generally try the card before Paypal, but
| impatient customers in the same boat may behave differently.
| Ecco wrote:
| I rarely see Adyen mentioned in those HN threads. They might not
| be as big as PayPal or Stripe but in my experience they are
| really good.
| tnolet wrote:
| I hope their API and SDK got better. It was a pain to implement
| and use some years ago. Stripe was light years ahead and we
| ended up switching. Also the capital demands from Adyen were
| much higher than Stripe.
| Ecco wrote:
| I would say they're ok now. But that being said, I feel like
| we're putting too much emphasis on the ease of integration
| anyway. Sure, it's your first interaction with a payment
| gateway. But it's also something you really only do once... I
| believe other criterias are a lot more important.
| cinntaile wrote:
| Management: "Hey guys, we need to implement some sort of
| payment system". Developers: "Ok, we'll see what's out
| there." Developers: "This one isn't well documented, this
| one isn't either... Oh hey this one is." Developers: "We
| suggest Stripe." Management: "Ok"
|
| I think you vastly underestimate the importance of ease of
| use.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Well it is a hard problem, isn't it? First impressions do
| matter, sure
|
| Management might also have a problem later in case of
| non-payment/chargebacks etc
|
| But, in general, people need to look past the first
| impression
| 3np wrote:
| Accurate, appropriately detailed, and up-to-date
| documentation and references are about way, way more than
| "first impressions".
|
| I really don't see how it's a hard problem either? How
| often does a payment gateway API really need to change?
| Just spend the resources necessary to get it right. If
| you really need to, hire (another) FTE on docs.
| spinlock wrote:
| I feel like stripe changed their api every day. They
| support legacy apis forever but you could definitely have
| a full time job keeping up with the latest version of
| stripe.
| dxdm wrote:
| Stripe also has much better transparency for
| troubleshooting. You can see exactly what happened to a
| payment, when and why. In the Adyen UI, it's not even
| simple to find a given payment. Stripe also has much better
| docs, and their API makes more sense and gets in your way
| less. As a developer, I much prefer integrating and dealing
| with Stripe, over Adyen.
| plantain wrote:
| At least previously they had unattainable minimums for most
| small enterprise. Looks like that might have improved since.
| odiroot wrote:
| I had to integrate with them years ago. The API was really
| terrible. Inconsistent, badly documented and overall look like
| it was released prematurely. It scarred me for life.
| tothrowaway wrote:
| Unless something has changed, Adyen only works with businesses
| with payment volumes in the millions. They don't have a sign up
| form. It's a "Contact Us" kind of thing.
| com wrote:
| Their definition of a small business large enough to talk to
| was annual $50m in card transactions. At that size, your
| transaction costs are pretty low and the white glove service
| starts getting pretty good.
| swyx wrote:
| probably also an american bias on HN, while Adyen mostly
| active in Europe
| nottorp wrote:
| Hmm. All I understand is, should I ever try to sell something
| online, I should stay away from US based payment systems.
| jotm wrote:
| In Europe, PayPal is PayPal circa 2010. Everyone knows it and
| it's too convenient - make account, add card and bank, pay
| wherever.
|
| Seller accounts seem to get shafted on the regular but they still
| keep using it.
| rippercushions wrote:
| I'm sure the business side has its problems, but as a consumer, I
| _far_ prefer Stripe over PayPal. I 've _never_ had a payments
| problem with Stripe, while PayPal is consistently painful.
|
| I have a credit card issued by a bank in country X, but my home
| address both in reality and in bank X's records is in country Y.
| This seems to consistently trigger that fabled PayPal fraud
| protection the article mentions, making it impossible to enter my
| information correctly. After lots of poking about in the dark, I
| eventually figured out that the only way to make PayPal payments
| through this card is to set my country as "X" and enter a
| completely fictitious address in X with a separate delivery
| address in Y, after which the transaction sails through happily.
| dubcanada wrote:
| I've had problems with both, but at this very moment more
| problems with Stripe then PayPal.
|
| At least with PayPal if I sign up for a $10 a month plan I can
| go into PayPal via the very very difficult to find recurring
| transaction area and cancel said transaction. I cannot do that
| on Stripe.
|
| I strongly feel that I should be able to cancel ANY monthly
| transaction without having to go through the hoops and juggling
| act that is attempting to get the merchant to cancel said
| transaction. If I want to cancel a subscription why do I have
| to convince someone else to do it.
|
| Just let me cancel my stupid monthly subscription since
| everyone wants to do them.
| tyre wrote:
| To make sure I understand, you (as a consumer) would like a
| way to log in to Stripe and see all of your payments and
| subscriptions connected to businesses that are using Stripe?
| Then cancel recurring subscriptions there?
|
| If you use Apple's App Store, similar to how they let you
| view/manage all subscriptions on one place?
|
| (I build things at Stripe, in a space that's relevant to this
| use case.)
| dubcanada wrote:
| That would be useful, but even just being able to enter my
| credit card details in the form that can do transaction
| lookups and cancelling that way.
| plugin-baby wrote:
| Not the OP, but I'm surprised this is not already possible
| - seems like a basic, consumer-friendly feature, and might
| also reduce chargebacks.
| lucb1e wrote:
| I tried to pay with Stripe only once and it didn't let me.
| Can't live in Germany and provide a Dutch bank account. Should
| not make _any_ difference within the Single Euro Payment Area.
| Sorry, DeepL, then I will have to continue to use the free
| version, I 'm not missing any features anyway, I just wanted to
| pay for my use... (I also let support know but they didn't care
| of course.)
|
| PayPal required for a few years that I use a VPN for being
| allowed to log in. All the support could do for me was offer to
| close my Dutch account so that I could open a German account to
| use here. I hear that others have no problems using PayPal
| while on holiday abroad, so not sure what's up with that.
| Sometimes it also throws javascript errors and gets stuck on
| some loading icon. Plus all the horror stories about paypal.
|
| The things that always worked effortlessly for me were iDeal
| (collaboration of Dutch banks for online payments), regular
| bank transfers (always free in the SEPA zone, but takes 0-4
| days depending on bank holidays and servers that take a weekend
| off), and direct debit (provide your name, address, and IBAN,
| such as at Liberapay, and everything will be arranged
| automatically). Basically, the European stuff simply works, not
| sure why.
| mrweasel wrote:
| As a customer: I don't not care to know who you use for
| payments, I will NEVER interact with them.
|
| Some have pointed out that they had been running in circle
| between Stripe and AMEX. Maybe AMEX is special I don't know. If
| there's a problem with my payment and the company responsible
| for the charge isn't reacting, then it's my banks problem, not
| mine.
|
| For legitimt companies, if there's any issue with my payment, I
| don't care how, you can't blame Stripe, as I have no business
| with them, you go deal with Stripe if they are the issue.
|
| Overall I think many have falsely viewed Stripe as some final
| solution to payments. Mostly I think because they where easy to
| create an account with. Even before Stripe it wasn't actually
| difficult sign up with a payment provider and most of them
| where better and easier to interact with, even if their APIs
| where worse.
| testfrequency wrote:
| Not even remotely comparable.
|
| - PayPal is trying to be a wallet for online payments - Stripe is
| payment infrastructure for the world
| pierrebai wrote:
| Just as a contrary standpoint, I personally _like_ to see the
| Paypal logo and the fact that it is Paypal processing my payment
| and not some I-roll-ed-my-own just-wait-for-me-get-hacked random
| system.
|
| I also learned to loathe stripe (and square) due to those PoS
| system that have ridiculously high tipping options even for
| transactions that really ought not to be tipping situation. No, I
| do not want to give 20% tips when buying bread over the counter
| at the bakery, thank you very much. (This may not be stripe
| fault, but the store owner. I resent both just to cover all
| bases.)
| annexrichmond wrote:
| Coffee shop I went to today requires you to order from a tablet
| and it also asked for minimum 20% tip. The nerve lol.
|
| Tangential, but the iPad ordering sucked. Couldn't find the
| Flat White option, turned out you have to click into Cappuccino
| option first, as if that makes any sense. Oh and you order
| pastries from it as well. What happened to be able to see the
| pastries behind the window counter?
| snotrockets wrote:
| Does the iPad also makes the coffee?
|
| As long as we allow the US food industry to not pay employees
| directly, you should tip, or make your own coffee.
| spinlock wrote:
| I used to tip the highest option at the "woke" coffee shop that
| I went to on the daily. Then, I asked the barista if she got
| the tips. She said the employees never saw any of those add on
| tips and I should give her cash if I wanted to tip _her_.
| mellavora wrote:
| Not disputing your story, but wouldn't the bad be on the
| business owner, not on the payment processor?
| spinlock wrote:
| Yup. I'm just pointing out that tips get stolen that way
| very often. You should ask the server you think your
| tipping if they get those tips. Far too often you're just
| overpaying for coffee.
| danenania wrote:
| In many cases, depending where you live, withholding tips
| like that would be illegal.
| spinlock wrote:
| It is. Illegal stuff happens all the time.
| oli5679 wrote:
| Growth of digital wallets could make payment products more
| homogeneous.
|
| If Apple/Google control the UX and fraud verification, people
| should go with the cheapest option.
|
| I'd love to buy a cheaper Stripe alternative, and if it has a
| poor UX I'd only use it for Google/Apple wallet payment, which
| could be more than 75% in Europe by the end of the decade.
| mlinhares wrote:
| That's not how digital wallets work, they're just on the client
| side, you still need Stripe or something like it to talk to the
| credit card companies and perform the payment (and all the
| other backoffice steps required that people don't know about,
| swiping the card is the simplest part of the whole process).
| ksec wrote:
| >People really, _really_ , hate Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.
|
| This coming from Zed Shaw at least carries more weight than me
| ranting about this observation on HN.
|
| One of the thing listed in the article that had me really worry
| was chargeback. And it seems to be quite common in Stripe world.
| In low margin world $15 is quite a lot unless you have volume.
| pavlov wrote:
| Corporations really want you to believe that grassroots
| personal boycotts are ineffective and a waste of time, but the
| truth is much more complicated.
|
| Enough people boycott PayPal to make a web developer choose
| another payment product. He writes about it on HN which
| amplifies the boycott's message to tens of thousands of
| readers. Some of them will join the boycott. PayPal's PR
| department is presumably unhappy about this reason now coming
| up in searches like "PayPal vs Stripe." And it didn't take any
| centralized organizing.
| smca_ wrote:
| (Sam from Stripe here.) The customer's bank (not Stripe) levies
| a $15 fee to process the dispute.
|
| If you win the dispute, we credit you $15 because we feel it's
| the right thing to do.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| No.. because the merchant is paying for those fees. Not the
| customer / consumer.
|
| You might have different agreements, because you negotiated
| lower prices because supposedly you have better fraud
| detection etc.. But that's not the same as "because we feel
| it's the right thing to do".
|
| On the side of the merchant you do the same.. with "Stripe
| Chargeback Protection", but you charge for that.
|
| You took a part of the bank's/card's business (risk
| management), and that's fine, but please don't tell us stripe
| is doing things because you feel anything.
| NorwegianDude wrote:
| I think the author is mixing chargebacks with PayPal
| disputes/claims as PayPal also takes a fee for chargebacks.
|
| Also, one of the things that are wrong in this post is about
| Stripe rasar(fraud prevention). It's included in standard
| pricing, it's not 4 %...
|
| My experience over 10+ years using PayPal and 5+ years using
| Stripe is that Stripe has much better docs. Just had something
| stop working because PayPal changes their webhooks, and even
| their docs are wrong.
|
| Just a few hours ago a customer opened a PayPal claim, and now
| PayPal took the money hostage. The customer closed the claim, but
| the one case number the customer has resulted in 10 case numbers
| for me, and they are still open.
|
| When it comes to "friendly fraud" (customer buys something, and
| claims it was not them after receiving it), it would be hard to
| do a worse job than PayPal.
|
| If a customer opens e.g. 15 claims for unauthorized use,
| basically stating that someone else used their card, PayPal
| usually always agree with the customer on like 12 of them, while
| 3 of them PayPal think was legit. Sure PayPal, someone stole
| their PayPal account, purchased digital goods on my service on an
| account belonging to the PayPal owner that the PayPal owner
| clearly is using according to me and PayPal themself.
|
| Chargebacks usually costs money, but PayPal claims is basically
| just a click to take money from the seller, with no risk. So just
| that possibility makes PayPal much worse than Stripe.
|
| Stripe isn't perfect, but support is better and at least it's
| much more resistant to friendly fraud.
| Dawnyhff2 wrote:
| hobobaggins wrote:
| > Also, one of the things that are wrong in this post is about
| Stripe rasar(fraud prevention). It's included in standard
| pricing, it's not 4 %...
|
| Radar is not free. https://stripe.com/radar/pricing
| tyre wrote:
| The author got it right. On the page you linked, it shows
| Radar's ML fraud detection is free with standard pricing
| (payments.)
|
| There are other features of Radar that are built for fraud
| teams (not likely to exist at small companies), which cost
| extra.
| prirun wrote:
| > I think the author is mixing chargebacks with PayPal
| disputes/claims as PayPal also takes a fee for chargebacks.
|
| What the article says is that PayPal allows payers to request a
| refund, which is not a chargeback and is free to the vendor.
| Stripe does not have a dispute or refund process other than
| chargebacks and they charge vendors $15 for each according to
| the article.
| nightpool wrote:
| This article is extremely confusing and filled with do many
| errors it's hard to even list them all. However, the bit I wanted
| to focus on was the author's claim that PayPal got "sued" and
| "stopped taking money from people". Getting sued is part of the
| ordinary course of business for a company like PayPal, and ~85%
| of lawsuits like that go nowhere, and result in no internal
| changes. The specific lawsuit the author seems to have been
| talking about was dismissed entirely by a judge in July, because
| the contact you sign with Facebook when you use their account
| explicitly forbids you from suing them instead of going through
| private arbitration proceedings:
| https://www.pokertube.com/article/chris-moneymaker-s-class-a...
| (Chris Moneymaker's Class Action Lawsuit Against PayPal Falls At
| First Hurdle).
|
| And again, this is the kind of thing that happens to PayPal all
| the time. The fact that some random lawsuit that never even
| required a substantial reply from PayPal got picked up by Zed as
| evidence of their bad behavior "finally catching up to them"
| really erodes my confidence in the way he represents any of the
| other details in this article. What else is he misrepresenting or
| exaggerating?
| Dawnyhff2 wrote:
| kweks wrote:
| PayPal has not stopped their freeze/seize gambit.
|
| A few examples of these clauses being exercised were on HN
| (both cases pending) -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29935515
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32739950
|
| If it wasn't obvious, cherry-picking bits and pieces from
| various jurisdictions isn't legal; PayPal deftly deflects any
| legal challenges to their various dispersed entities making
| them essentially untouchable if you don't have unlimited
| resources.
|
| If anyone is interested, in the EU, this is their playbook:
|
| - Ignore all communications unless it's a C&D from lawyers
|
| - Deflect responsibility to PayPal Luxembourg.
|
| - They have, or have had literally 90% of LU lawyers retained,
| meaning your case will not / cannot be accepted by the majority
| of LU law-firms due to conflict of interest
|
| - Deflect onto the CSSF (Luxembourg Monetary Watchdog)
|
| - Respond to the CSSF that the complaining company is not based
| in Luxembourg, which results in the CSSF concluding that they
| are not the competent structure to rule.
|
| - Case closed, your funds have been stolen, and PayPal has
| artfully dodged the relevant regulatory bodies.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| "the contact you sign with Facebook"? I am so confused. Do you
| mean the contract you sign with PayPal?
| kweks wrote:
| Other elements are simply incorrect. If a customer lodges a
| chargeback, you pay a chargeback fee :
| https://www.paypal.com/ca/smarthelp/article/what-is-the-char...
| spinlock wrote:
| I didn't realize this was Zed until reading your comment. Now
| I'm smirking thinking of Mr. Shaw getting frustrated by
| implementing payments "the hard way."
| [deleted]
| pierrebai wrote:
| There are many suit and claims against Paypal. Most of them are
| settled out of court. Many are exactly about account freezing.
| The fact that one went to court but was dismissed does not
| prove that Paypal does not engage in bad bahaviour.
|
| It's not merely the cost of doing business, it's the cost of
| avoiding judgements against bad practices.
|
| Do note that Paypal did lose some suits, notably in Quebec for
| example, where customers protection laws are stronger and
| arbitration clauses in user agreements cannot force you to
| forfeit rights you have under the law, in particular to sue.
|
| https://lastattorney.com/paypal-class-action-lawsuit-settlem...
| emadda wrote:
| If you want to analyse your payment failures with SQL you could
| use https://table.dog to download them into a SQLite database.
| Kukumber wrote:
| It's not, Stripe is the world before PayPal, annoying, and no
| protection against chargebacks/frauds, worse, you have to pay
| whenever it happen
| ta3411 wrote:
| I am finding myself too locked in with Stripe Connect (we are
| building a marketplace) where Stripe is handling all KYC,
| onboarding, payment, and seller payout. Does anyone have any good
| recommendations on how to build redundancy into this? ie: receive
| payment via PayPal and build our own payout system
| tyre wrote:
| (I work at Stripe.)
|
| With Connect, you can do onboarding flows yourself with the
| Custom plan. Note that information gathering and regulatory
| requirements for onboarding across dozens of countries is a
| huge amount of effort. We have whole teams working on this
| problem alone; not for the feint of heart.
|
| In the abstract we don't care if you do onboarding or we do.
| Stripe doesn't make money there. We offer a solution because
| it's a difficult problem that we're in a position to handle for
| users.
|
| With payouts you could do something similar. I believe there
| are platforms that pay everything out to one bank account and
| then pay out to customers themselves. I'm not an expert on
| these flows, but I believe it's to cut down on foreign exchange
| fees--preventing multiple "hops". We're working on making this
| better.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| >After several lawsuits and years of backlash Paypal has stopped
| seizing people's money illegally. I still have no idea how this
| was not full on totally illegal, but I'm sure someone can explain
| to me how payment companies get away with keeping money that is
| clearly not theirs.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32739950
| MarkPNeyer wrote:
| Did a quick ctrl-f for 'bitcoin' here in the comments.
|
| Finding nothing. Just have to add: Lightning Network payments are
| ~free, ~instant, and as bearer instruments the merchants aren't
| responsible for fraud.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| > because Stripe clearly didn't care about fraud prevention
|
| But, they do like to write think pieces on it.
|
| https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/the-fraud-supply-chain/
| Dawnyhff2 wrote:
| numair wrote:
| > Paypal's inclusion of fraud prevention makes it about 50%
| cheaper than Stripe with Radar.
|
| The money quote. (No pun intended!) I doubt this article will
| stay on the front page for very long, because HN seems to have a
| difficult time with content that is critical of one of Y
| Combinator's biggest portfolio positions.
| blfr wrote:
| Don't know about the rest of HN, I have a hard time with
| content praising PayPal, considering things like
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33062320
| omnimus wrote:
| Paypal is also completely unusable for companies that are
| based in country with different currency than they do
| bussiness in. If for example you are swiss (CHF) and do
| online bussiness in USD or EUR. Once you want to transfer the
| money to your company bank account it can be account only in
| CHF and Paypal will insist on doing the conversion with their
| very "friendly" exchange rate. Basically taking another ~5%
| making them much more expensive than the rest.
| kareemm wrote:
| I get around this by cashing out the original currency to
| Wise and then doing the conversion at much friendlier rates
| using them.
| omnimus wrote:
| Interesting Paypal didn't allow me to do this because the
| bank (Wises bank was in different country than my country
| (which is true). It required bank in my nation.
| numair wrote:
| I think this article is equally critical of both companies.
| Which is quite remarkable given the narrative that was
| popular a few years ago. We've gone from an obvious winner to
| a dead heat. Goes to show: if you've got perfect competition,
| just wait a while...
| smca_ wrote:
| This isn't quite accurate. Stripe Radar (our fraud prevention
| tool) is included free of charge for all accounts with standard
| pricing: https://stripe.com/radar/pricing.
| dubcanada wrote:
| Stripe is extremely bad at fraud. I have a company that continues
| to charge my credit card monthly, their website and email do not
| work anymore. I continue to charge back them every single month,
| and Stripe continues to charge my card. This has been going on
| for about 7 months now. If I ask them to help, they tell me to
| contact AMEX, I contact AMEX they tell me to contact Stripe.
|
| The website doesn't work, the email doesn't work, I charge it
| back every single month, yet Stripe doesn't care one bit.
|
| Attempting to contact Stripe results in emails asking if I need
| help resetting my password (yes I legit sent an email asking for
| them to investigate the "company" and they sent back a reply with
| details on how to reset my password), to telling me to contact my
| credit card provider.
|
| Honestly both companies are giant bags of turds, if you can you
| should look elsewhere, you can save money on almost every fee,
| there are alternatives to every single product they provide, and
| pretty much all of the alternatives are varying degrees of better
| or cheaper.
| uudecoded wrote:
| It is important to note that Stripe is a wrapper around Wells
| Fargo.
|
| This means it's an 800 pound gorilla in a dev/bay friendly
| costume (docs? API?).
|
| They cannot fix the financial system unless they can become
| Wells. That will not happen. Thus, their actions, pricing, and
| product development choices all point to Wells.
|
| PayPal has this exact theme of a problem. Or lack of solving.
| codegeek wrote:
| You can contact AMEX to block the vendor from any further
| charges. Can you not ?
| dubcanada wrote:
| I've done that 4 times, AMEX has a block (multiple blocks as
| per the reps). But the charges still go through (that's
| another story).
|
| The AMEX people just keep saying Stripe has a "iron clad
| contract" so even with that, they cannot do much.
|
| I am not saying it is a 100% Stripe. But why would a company
| like Stripe allow me to do (successfully) 7 chargebacks in a
| row. At what point would an account be shut down or a
| subscription terminated? If this was PayPal, the account
| would have been frozen ages ago.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Can you not report your card as stolen, get your bank to
| issue you a new one, and be done with it?
| dubcanada wrote:
| I've got a brand new card number, CVC, etc. They can
| still charge it because the subscription contract exists,
| there is nothing AMEX can do.
|
| Even with a brand new credit card, reported as stolen,
| what ever. If a monthly subscription contract exists
| (which you sign once you click that button to pay $5
| monthly I guess), they can continue charging the account.
|
| This was what AMEX rep told me.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Okay. So I can steal an AMEX card (in fact, copy the
| numbers so that the cardholder is not aware), subscribe
| it to a bunch of leeching services, and expect that those
| subscriptions will go on and on even if the holder finds
| out and changes the card details?
|
| My god.
|
| It doesn't quite work like that in Europe, as far as I
| know. The fact that you file chargebacks over and over
| and they don't do shit is even more insane.
| blfr wrote:
| > It doesn't quite work like that in Europe
|
| Which is annoying in its own way because when your card
| expire, you need to manually re-enter its new details
| into all the services you're using. And you (or at least
| I) will inevitably forget one of these until you need it
| urgently.
| nottorp wrote:
| Looks less annoying to me than not being able to cancel.
|
| Although in the US people still subscribe to "newspapers"
| where you can subscribe online but have to wait for hours
| on hold on a hotline to end the subscription...
| indemnity wrote:
| Not annoying to me either, I do it every two or so years
| to clean house of unnecessary subscriptions.
|
| I would get super annoyed at the US behaviour.
| bambax wrote:
| Not annoying at all. It's a good opportunity to revisit
| each subscription and check if it's actually useful.
| andreareina wrote:
| You can try contacting your ombudsman, official notice is
| less likely to get the circular finger-pointing game
| massysett wrote:
| It's pretty surprising that credit card companies will
| route charges to the particular "account" linked with a
| "number" even if the "number" is "closed" or "cancelled"
| or "expired". Certainly not the experience one
| intuitively expects up front. I realized this when the
| bank issues me a new card proactively due to a data
| breach, but old recurring charges still work.
|
| I guess this is both for customer convenience and to give
| the bank more flexibility, but I think this would be a
| lot simpler if closed credit card numbers just stopped
| working.
| cj wrote:
| If anyone is interested in how this works:
|
| https://stripe.com/docs/saving-cards#automatic-card-
| updates
|
| > Stripe works with card networks and automatically
| attempts to update saved card details whenever a customer
| receives a new card (for example, replacing an expired
| card or one that was reported lost or stolen).
|
| > It is widely supported in the United States, allowing
| Stripe to automatically update most American Express,
| Visa, Mastercard, and Discover cards issued there.
| prirun wrote:
| Google did this to me with GCS: they automatically
| updated my expiring credit card. It's not a terrible
| feature, but I think users should consent to it before
| companies do it.
| dwighttk wrote:
| They probably do. Remember the terms and conditions that
| we didn't read?
| codegeek wrote:
| Some stripe folks are very active on HN. May be they can
| help ?
| allisdust wrote:
| I really like how they implemented this in India. Due to recent
| central bank changes, all recurring subscriptions need customer
| notification before the card is charged. So before a recurring
| charge occurs (1 day before), they send a sms with a link to
| cancel that charge if required. Also now most credit cards are
| providing a single place to manage all subscriptions. So you
| can approve requests for recurring authorisation (first time)
| and also delete an existing recurring charge with a single
| click. Not to mention to be able to see who all are charging or
| going to charge you recurring in the first place.
| davchana wrote:
| To add, the retailers are not allowed to store any card
| details, like number, dates etc now. They are required to
| send all these to bank first time, and they get a token only.
| Next time of a recurring transaction, they simply send this
| token to bank to charge money.
|
| Customer can see these tokens anytime, along with merchant
| details, and customer can revoke these tokens anytime.
| rajup wrote:
| This is a fantastic idea! Wish it were here in the US. In
| some areas like fintech/banking it appears "developing"
| economies like India are light years ahead of us.
| toast0 wrote:
| There are benefits to being late to market. The US also has
| close to 5000 banks and nearly as many credit unions,
| whereas most 'developing' economies have only a handful.
| Banks have to follow state and federal rules (sometimes
| both, sometimes only one or the other, depending on the
| rules and the corporate details). Centralization into only
| a few firms and maybe a single regulator makes it easier to
| have consistent features and requirements.
| pyb wrote:
| The EU should adopt this.
| imtringued wrote:
| The EU already has this but for some insane reason there
| are no electronic SEPA mandates only paper ones, also you
| must request the cancellation of the SEPA mandate from the
| merchant.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| The US too! This sounds great. Even better would be a
| recurring subscriptions management panel provided by the
| credit card issuer. Then you could cancel from there, and
| the service provider would be notified.
| njovin wrote:
| This sounds like a fun time to run an experiment with getting
| an injunction against Stripe. Next time it happens, rather than
| doing a chargeback, sue them for the actual amount in addition
| to all of your time spent dealing with it. Then seek a
| preliminary injunction preventing them from charging your card
| any longer. You can probably do this on your own, although it
| will be time-consuming.
|
| At that point it becomes a legal problem for them and I suspect
| they'll be forced to take more serious action.
| [deleted]
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The only time it makes sense to sue in civil court is either:
|
| - The damages in question would exceed hundreds of thousands
| of dollars
|
| - You want to make an example out of the defendant and have
| lots of money to burn
|
| - You are engaging in litigation as part of a settlement
| extortion scheme ala Prenda Law
|
| America does not award legal fees to the victor - in fact,
| it's considered so un-American that American lawyers
| literally call it the British Rule[0]. As a result, small
| actors - which you almost certainly are - will bankrupt
| themselves just getting to the discovery phase, regardless of
| if they are plaintiffs or defendants.
|
| In a few situations, this has become such a problem that US
| law either provides time-saving motions for common forms of
| nuisance lawsuits[1] or uses it as a way to encourage certain
| behaviors[2] out of litigants. However, this kind of fraud
| case will almost certainly not fall under such measures, and
| you are almost certainly too small to defend.
|
| Representing yourself in court is technically possible but
| practically a death sentence to your case. And an actual
| lawyer would tell you exactly what I've told you, except with
| actual attorney-client privilege[3] involved, and they'd
| charge you for telling you that. Except they'd probably also
| add in a bunch of stuff about class-action waivers and
| binding arbitration[4] that would make it nearly impossible
| for them to represent you.
|
| [0] I've also heard French Rule.
|
| [1] Such as Anti-SLAPP motions, though these are not in
| federal law yet.
|
| [2] The copyright registration system comes with a few key
| perks; notably statutory damages and the ability to recover
| attorney's fees. If you do not have either you cannot
| economically sue a copyright infringer, which sounds like a
| really good way to comply with Berne without complying with
| Berne.
|
| [3] I am not a lawyer.
|
| [4] For what it's worth, there are some crafty lawyers that
| have figured out a way to help people mass-arbitrate, but
| companies are trying to fight back against that too.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| - You want to make an example out of the defendant and have
| time to burn
|
| Sue them in small claims court. You won't get significant
| money, but they'll have to burn a little money on lawyers.
| You have the chance at the moral victory of the judge
| saying you're right*. You probably have a decent chance of
| getting on the HN front page when you first file and when
| you win/lose. You have a noticably higher chance at being
| covered in the mainstream media than if you just complain
| on the internet.
|
| *The judge generally doesn't literally say you're right
| zdragnar wrote:
| For such a small transaction, in the US you're stuck with
| small claims courts, and iirc you generally aren't going to
| get any damages for your time there unless it somehow
| interfered with your work hours.
| arbuge wrote:
| > unless it somehow interfered with your work hours
|
| This doesn't sound like a particularly difficult bar to
| clear.
| zdragnar wrote:
| It is if you're not an hourly employee. In small claims
| courts, you need a pretty clear demonstration of actual
| damages. You don't get to just make up a number that
| sounds nice. Therapy bills from stress, maybe, but this
| scenario seems like it would be taking up an hour or so
| of time in a month. In any case, small claims courts
| usually try to get you to go through arbitration first,
| and stripe would almost certainly cave with a small offer
| since it would cost less than an hour of a lawyers time.
| rvcdbn wrote:
| Since this is HN I will characteristically take my precious
| private moments sitting on the toilet to correct this wrong
| understanding on the internet. Small claims court is an
| _additional_ option if the defendant lives in the same
| state and the amount is small. Civil court is always _also_
| an option even if small claims court also applies. So this
| reply makes no sense. You're wrong. I know it hurts so bad
| but it's okay because we are all wrong sometimes. So we
| will let it go this once there is no need to delete your
| account and make a new one. Small claims court is great for
| some things: I sued my ex land lord who wouldn't return my
| deposit. Lawyers aren't allowed and it's usually open and
| shut. Anyway hope you have a great Thursday!
| j-bos wrote:
| But then woudn't the poster be locked out of purchasing goods
| and services facilitated through Stripe?
| spinlock wrote:
| This happened to me with Citibank. But, I called citibank and
| got a new card number. Then, citibank gave the new card number
| to the fraudsters when they tried to charge me the next month.
|
| Unfortunately, I'm going through a divorce right now so I can't
| cancel that credit card. But, as soon as I'm free that's on the
| top of my list of things to do to start living the rest of my
| life.
| notwhereyouare wrote:
| Citibank probably didn't give them the new card number.
| There's a link somewhere between stripe and Citibank that is
| tied to your account and not the specific card
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Citibank did. The major banks all participate in Visa,
| Mastercard, and Amex's updater programs.
|
| https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/visa-
| accoun...
|
| https://developer.mastercard.com/product/automatic-
| billing-u...
|
| https://www.americanexpress.com/us/merchant/cardrefresher.h
| t...
|
| It's Citi's fault for not flagging the change being for
| fraud reasons, which skips the updaters.
| kweks wrote:
| There are third party solutions to fraud that actually work,
| providing chargeback insurance.
|
| Essentially, they screen transactions; if any approved
| transactions are chargebacked, they refund you.
|
| A good start point is https://signifyd.com
|
| We dropped in this solution on our e-commerce about 5 years
| ago; fraud has been a non existent problem.
| kaivi wrote:
| I have a perspective from the other end of this, as a seller.
| Been using Stripe for 5 years selling digital content with a
| low, $5 average bill. A year ago the site was likely noticed by
| hackers who started punching in dozens of stolen credit cards.
| I kept refunding manually at first, but then I had activated
| Stripe Radar. It made absolutely zero difference out of the
| box. "-Is it a 100th charge coming from the same IP in Ukraine
| with a Canadian VISA? No problem, charge approved, here's your
| success webhook.". "-Same fake TLD for the email address, for a
| customer number 2235? Nothing suspicious here, charge
| approved.".
|
| What helped fight this was to create a rule in Radar to reject
| all cards without 3D Secure capability, but it had cut off a
| sizable chunk of legit revenue.
| gary_0 wrote:
| Is there no way to get Stripe to automatically refund all
| chargebacks/disputes? What if you're only getting a 5% fraud
| rate for something cheap and you want to just eat the loss
| and not have to manually deal with disputes? Or if you're
| selling something like a premium online account, you can just
| disable the user's account automatically if they dispute the
| charge.
| zrail wrote:
| Disputes automatically refund the amount disputed plus the
| fee. The onus is on the merchant to fight the dispute and
| claw the money back.
|
| (Disclaimer: I used to work at Stripe on the dispute
| resolution team. I no longer work at Stripe.)
| spinlock wrote:
| 5% is huge. Like, ban your business from taking credit
| cards huge.
| Brystephor wrote:
| Yep. Anything greater than 1% is leading to trouble such
| as huge fees or being kicked off a card network.
| gary_0 wrote:
| So you're saying all I need to do to knock a business
| offline is spam it with enough fraudulent CC numbers?
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| We're actually working to provide this functionality as a
| service but it's currently stealth so I can't get into
| much more detail.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Yes you might be able to do that, at the risk of some
| personal liability because this is illegal. It's also
| grossly unethical.
|
| If your fraud has a large enough monetary value, large
| enough scale, or you work with another person on it, you
| can get hit with a serious felony charge and end up in
| prison for a few years. Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer or
| expert on credit card fraud.
| Kamq wrote:
| I think people don't realize how much of the economy
| relies on agreements to not be a piece of shit.
|
| Sort of like the highway system relies on an agreement
| not to play bumper-cars. There's nothing actually
| stopping anyone.
| pardon_me wrote:
| I have seen a business run with this dealing with mobile
| phones targeted by organised fraudsters. Moving "too
| fast" to notice and whoops profit is PS0.2m not PS3m.
| joshmn wrote:
| > What if you're only getting a 5% fraud rate for something
| cheap
|
| Something cheap turns into a $15 dispute fee.
| globile wrote:
| This is the big problem with Stripe's positioning in the
| payments food chain ladder.
|
| Block every single fraudulent or suspicious transaction, and
| you're leaving obscene amounts of money on the table.
|
| The amount of credit card fraud that goes unclaimed or is
| eaten by liability shift is huge, so if Stripe makes a
| product like Radar ACTUALLY WORK, they would be missing out
| big time.
|
| I am confident Stripe's radar's shortcomings are deliberate
| and not simple bugs or design problems.
|
| It appears they have no incentive for the product to be 100%
| effective and that would explain why Stripe Radar is billed
| per screened transaction, regardless of outcome.
|
| We benchmark Stripe Radar against other pure play fraud
| fingerprinting solutions, and the difference is abysmal. The
| fact that Stripe claims to have seen 80% of any card before
| it gets to your store make this fact even worse.
|
| So, like parent says, you are going to see radar scores of 90
| and 95 for certain charges (clearly fraudulent carding
| attempts), followed by scores of 15 or 20 for the same card,
| IP, fingerprint with absolutely no warning.
|
| I've grown tired of escalating this to Support. They just
| give me the ML model answer. Basically: "It's a black box!"
|
| You can definitely add a rule to start blocking charges from
| X places, or with Y velocity, or always enforce 3DS, but then
| you're taking the model into your own hands, and that has
| some important consequences.
|
| Your acceptance rate goes down. You're heavily interfering
| with the model and relying (and trusting) it less, and you
| realise you really don't need Radar to do that for you.
|
| If you're serious about fraud, you must use a pure player
| solution that is 100% aligned with your interests.
|
| From what we've seen with Stripe Radar in the past, that
| doesn't seem to be the case.
|
| I'm a big fan of Stripe in may ways, but I really have a
| love/hate relationship with this side of their business...
| groffee wrote:
| What do the scammers get out of buying your stuff with a
| stolen credit card? You get the funds, but what do they get?
| jedberg wrote:
| It's called card running. You get a trove of credit cards,
| so you use them to buy tiny things that the card holders
| hopefully won't notice. Now you've sorted the list into
| valid and invalid cards, and can resell the valid list for
| a lot more money to a scammer who will use it for large
| scale fraud.
| gibolt wrote:
| This is similar to all the 'empty' spam calls people get.
| They are just probing for validity, so they can use or sell
| it later,
| netrus wrote:
| For example, they now know that the CC number they
| purchased in bulk is authentic.
| spinlock wrote:
| Just to explain, people selling stolen cards have a
| reputation that makes them money. If they have a
| reputation for selling cards that have already been
| burned, they can't sell each card for as much. But, I'd
| they have a good way to test their cards, they can get a
| reputation for only selling cards that still work. This
| lets them sell each card for multiples of what a
| fraudster with a bad reputation can charge.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I have no idea why it works this way these days, online
| fraud should have been solved a long long time ago with
| technology. The banks/mastercard/visa have the ability to
| mandate much better security mechanisms (3D Secure etc.,
| 2FA, generating some secure token for any large purchases
| etc.) so why aren't these compulsory?
| toast0 wrote:
| The first bank to only authorize purchases with 3DSecure
| lowers the fraud rate a lot, but people with multiple
| cards will mostly choose to use other cards, because it's
| less friction.
|
| Anyway, the merchant eats fraud for card not present
| transactions. So why would the bank choose to reduce its
| payment volume in order to reduce fraud it doesn't even
| have to pay for?
|
| If the merchant says 3D Secure only, it reduces fraud,
| but also reduces payment volume, because most customers
| will choose to use a merchant with less friction,
| especially if their issuing bank doesn't do 3D Secure, or
| it's broken when they go to purchase.
|
| Reducing fraud is good for merchants, but it the drop in
| sales may not be worth it. There's a lot of other things
| merchants can do to reduce fraud that aren't likely to
| cut into sales as much.
| spinlock wrote:
| Having worked on the banking side, I'd say it's because
| bankers hate technology. You'd be amazed at what some
| people will do to avoid it. I had one guy retire in 2005.
| When a new account manager took over his clients, we
| learned he'd been telling all of them the bank didn't
| have email. Just because he didn't want to adopt it.
| olivermuty wrote:
| Do you have suggestions for replacements for Stripe Connect for
| marketplace usage? The combination of being able to calculate
| fees and cuts before you tell Stripe to pay it out to partners
| through Stripe Connect seems pretty unique.
|
| There are several other Merchant of Record alternatives, but I
| have not found something that can do quite the programmatic
| approach you can with Stripe.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Airwallex is pretty good and it can replace both Stripe and
| Connect.
|
| I am a customer of their banking service and I played with
| their APIs. It feels like Stripe at the beginning, hopefully
| they'll be good for this decade
| jjeaff wrote:
| Braintree has a similar product. But they were bought by
| PayPal several years ago, so you are getting into that mess
| of a company.
| highwaylights wrote:
| Cant you just cancel the card and get a new one?
| pGuitar wrote:
| That's what I do once in a while... it works.
| freedomben wrote:
| Yeah but such a horrible solution. After the pain of
| reporting it and getting it changed, now you get to update a
| dozen or more auto-pay accounts. You're sure to miss at least
| one and have something (probably important like your internet
| or phone bill) cut off on you at the worst possible time.
| Plus you get to spend days without usable plastic. Hope you
| have a spare card or cash.
|
| Would much prefer a solution simpler/easier/less devstating
| than dropping Mjolnir on it.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| It's not a guarantee - card networks have a system where they
| will send payment processors the new card details, so the
| fraudulent charges will recur.
|
| As far as I know, it's not granular, per-merchant, so you
| can't skip the fraudulent merchant while updating the
| legitimate ones.
|
| Furthermore, some banks may not even give control to the user
| about whether this happens or not.
| smca_ wrote:
| (Sam from Stripe here.) Sorry for the issues so far. Could you
| email me more details at smca[at]stripe.com? I'll dig into
| this.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Hi Sam from Stripe, how about having a Stripe internal
| meeting about how Stripe support shouldn't consist of "X from
| Stripe here." HN posts? Are you aware "X from Stripe here."
| has become a HN meme?
| dubcanada wrote:
| I will send the full details/email chain tomorrow morning. I
| appreciate you looking into it, but why does this type of
| interaction require a HN article for a response? Why do none
| of the regular methods go anywhere?
| smca_ wrote:
| Put simply, it shouldn't. I'll help fix this when you have
| a chance to forward on. (We stop recurring payments when a
| business closes their Stripe account, which looks to not
| have been the case here.)
| O__________O wrote:
| Assuming user has issued chargebacks 7-months back to
| back -- why would this not be a signal Stripe needs to
| understand why and not keep charging the customer; one
| would think even one charge back from a vendor for a
| specific customer subscription would require re-
| authorization by the customer being charged prior to
| Stripe sending another charge.
|
| What am I missing?
| dubcanada wrote:
| If they closed their Stripe account I wouldn't be here ;)
|
| The problem is they decided to leave up their Stripe
| account and just stop replying.
| ldoughty wrote:
| Just to play devil's advocate... It can be hard to know
| that there's a problem if it doesn't get escalated to the
| right people.
|
| I'm sure most devs have an experience where something is
| broken for weeks before you happen to overhear someone
| talking about the multi-step workaround for a 5 minute code
| fix.
|
| I think the same kind of issue applies.. Support teams are
| encouraged to not escalate, if they do, it often goes to a
| higher level support (but not any developers/business
| people). They find a clever solution and that becomes the
| common practice. It's not until a big stink is made that
| the right people are aware of a possible problem, and
| perhaps only then investigate the scope of that problem,
| and realize it needs prioritization.
|
| Of course, this doesn't answer why the support team didn't
| even read the email to see you're not asking for a password
| reset... But might be a contributing factor.
| Kye wrote:
| Real world example: Mastodon would toss out and stop
| updating home feeds to save resources after a period of
| inactivity.
|
| https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/5634
|
| So people came back to empty timelines. _Terrible_ UX,
| but until someone both experienced it and mentioned it,
| no one with code access realized how bad this was for
| returning users. Now there 's a friendly message letting
| returning users know what's going on.
| [deleted]
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| I once found out that an admin person was spending a
| couple minutes many times a day to open a user profile,
| find half a dozen different fields and copy them into a
| word doc template and then printing to a pdf that she
| emailed to the user. I added a button "generate pdf" for
| her and she was thrilled.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| They don't care about fixing your payment problem. They
| care about fixing their PR problem.
|
| Not to pile on poor Sam here. This is a common thing in the
| finance industry, and tech, and basically everywhere.
| lettergram wrote:
| With thousands of employees you're bound to get some (say
| 5-10%!) which are outright bad at their job or malicious.
|
| The fact the founders quickly offered assistance
| directly, when they're business is worth tens of billions
| is at least worth giving the benefit of the doubt. Even
| if it's just for PR, they're at least doing it.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| > Even if it's just for PR, they're at least doing it.
|
| Why the hell would you praise a company for an empty
| gesture? You're defending bullshit like it's a good
| thing.
| lettergram wrote:
| I never suggested they were doing an empty gesture.
|
| I'm assuming they'll fix the problem, even if it's just
| for PR purposes.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| You should read more of the comments, including at least
| one that explicitly states how a founder reached out on
| HN only to never reply via email. It's been documented as
| an empty gesture, aka bullshit.
|
| Anyway I misread your previous comment, sorry about that.
| dom96 wrote:
| Would PayPal give the same response? At least with Stripe
| you know if you kick up a stink on Hacker News someone
| there will respond, not that this is ideal but I wouldn't
| expect to hear from any PayPal employees here.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| You might have a point. But I think it's moot because the
| overwhelming majority of wronged customers won't or can't
| put up a stink on Hacker News or equivalent. So the
| difference is a sliver.
| twic wrote:
| Last time this happened, OP replied to the Stripe guy
| something like "you said the same thing when i mentioned
| this on HN three months ago, i emailed you, and nothing
| happened". So with Stripe you might well get a response
| here, but that's not to say you'll actually get a
| resolution to your problem.
| ovao wrote:
| Assuming the thread gets enough upvotes to be noticed,
| anyway. That could mean posting at the right time of day,
| on the right day of the week, following another related
| story that helps drive more readers to check it out.
|
| While it's a fair point that with PayPal, you are almost
| entirely SOL, whereas with Stripe you at least have a
| _chance_ , it's not a tenable solution.
| bombcar wrote:
| PayPal let's you manage your subscriptions on your end
| iirc.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| They still have no API to allow me (as a seller) to check
| the status of a given subscription. Unbelievable.
| djbusby wrote:
| Yep, is a screen in their consumer-site that shows all
| active billing plans. Two clicks to cancel. And that page
| is easier to find now (was buried before)
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Yup. It's so obviously better for the consumer (and
| reduction of consumer support burden) that it's
| unbelievable that Stripe, or credit cards for that
| matter, don't have it.
| causality0 wrote:
| Putting out a fire on HN before it gets more press is
| something anyone would do so it basically means nothing.
| Now, if a founder commented on here "Don't bother sending
| me your details. I've un-fucked our support system, just
| submit a ticket again" _that_ would get my respect.
| spinlock wrote:
| I've talked to one of the founders of stripe on the phone
| after tweeting a complaint about their product. This was
| probably ~2014 but I've been an advocate for them ever
| since. It feels like a personal slight to read this blog
| post. Hopefully, they fix these issues because I like
| feeling good about using stripe.
| rgbrenner wrote:
| From your description, this is solidly Amex's problem, and all
| of your contact should be with Amex (or with the merchant you
| can't reach). I have no idea why they would tell you to contact
| a merchants credit card processor. In fact it's such a bizarre
| instruction from Amex, it makes me wonder how you described
| this to Amex.
| benj111 wrote:
| Being 2 years into a complaint with amex, 'bizarre
| instructions' don't surprise me at all.
| dubcanada wrote:
| I am curious about your response, what do you think I should
| do differently? And why do you think this is AMEX's problem?
|
| Also how should I describe a rather basic problem? I told
| them every aspect of it multiple times to multiple tiers of
| customer service. Email chains (or lack thereof), website
| details (include login), they already have transaction
| details.
|
| I am not saying it's a 100% Stripes problem, I am wondering
| why I am able to chargeback it 7 times in a row, and that
| does not trigger any red flags. If a single customer
| chargebacks a "subscription" multiple times in a row, should
| that not be an immediate cancel?
|
| Why can I not go to Stripe, fill out my credit card, and
| click cancel and cancel a subscription? They already have a
| portal to get transaction information, why not allow me to
| cancel. Since it's all webhooks anyways, what difference is
| it if it is through X merchant site or Stripe?
| rgbrenner wrote:
| It's Amex's problem contractually. The contractual
| relationships here are:
|
| customer -> card issuer (amex) -> card network (amex) <-
| card processor (stripe) <- merchant -> customer
|
| So as you can see, you have no relationship with Stripe.
| Your have a relationship with Amex and the merchant. Those
| are your points of contact.
|
| When you make a chargeback, Amex accepts this chargeback,
| and sends it to the merchant's processor, who then presents
| it to the merchant for response. This is a process defined
| in the contracts between each of the parties.
|
| To your other question regarding fraud controls in this
| system, that's handled in the contracts:
|
| - If you skip out on your debt, Amex must still pay for any
| charges they authorized. (The payment flow is customer ->
| Amex -> stripe -> merchant. This flow is reversed for a
| chargeback/refund.)
|
| - If a merchant skips out, stripe is still responsible for
| any chargebacks.
|
| Think about what this means: If stripe accepts too many
| high-risk merchants, they'll lose money. If Amex accepts
| too many high risk customers, they'll lose money. So they
| each have an interest in controlling fraud.
|
| So what happens when a merchant gets too many chargebacks
| (typically less than 1%): Stripe will refuse to do business
| with that merchant. Why would they do this? Because if
| Stripe has too many chargebacks, the card network will
| refuse to do business with Stripe. They may be able to
| recertify as a high risk processor, but that comes with
| additional requirements... and if its above those high-risk
| levels, the card network won't allow stripe to process any
| payments at all.
|
| This is all defined contractually.
|
| What is the contract you have? You have a contract with
| Amex: your credit card terms. And you have either an
| implied or explicit contract with the merchant that they
| must meet.
|
| Stripe and Amex are not fully aware of your contract with
| the merchant (refer to first relationship graph above).
| Part of the chargeback process is the merchant's response.
| A valid chargeback defense is that the charge meets the
| contractual terms the customer agreed to (assuming nothing
| illegal is going on). When the merchant presents the
| contract in their response, Stripe and Amex can review that
| contract. Amex (as the card issuer) gets to decide if they
| accept or reject the merchant's response and issue a
| decision on the chargeback. (Stripe (on behalf of the
| merchant) can disagree with this, and it then goes to the
| card network for a decision.)
|
| So that's the whole process.
|
| If you go to stripe directly (as a customer), you're
| attempting to do an end run around this contractually
| enforced process... and stripe isnt going to do that
| (unless they want to be sued for tortious interference by
| the merchant).
|
| So hopefully you can see why Amex telling you to call
| Stripe is so bizarre. What makes it even more odd is that
| the type of dispute you have is something Amex handles like
| a 1000 times a day... they have a process for it.
|
| And FYI: Amex can block a merchant from charging you in the
| future. (Easy on their part: just stop authorizing the
| charge from the merchant.)
| dubcanada wrote:
| I'm spoke to 12 regular customer service agents (over the
| months), and 2 managers at this point. How much further
| up the chain do I need to go? All of them said the exact
| same thing, "There is nothing more they can do, I need to
| contact the merchant (I cannot) or Stripe.". I've got it
| blocked every single time (I guess blocked is an attempt
| and does not guarantee it will be blocked) I called, and
| every dispute online via the checkbox.
|
| While I believe everything you said, I have not
| experienced it.
| [deleted]
| badpun wrote:
| I wonder if this counts as a case of wire fraud.
| dnet wrote:
| > After several lawsuits and years of backlash Paypal has stopped
| seizing people's money illegally.
|
| Flipper Zero project might disagree:
|
| https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/flipper_zero/status/156719464...
|
| https://www.dailydot.com/debug/flipper-zero-paypal/
| neilv wrote:
| I guess that the most recent tweet, that a shipping container
| of 15k units has been seized by US Customs, might be related.
|
| Could PayPal be acting under government orders, on this one?
| groffee wrote:
| Also https://www.dailywire.com/news/new-paypal-policy-lets-
| compan...
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Already rescinded, with a bullshit line about how it was a
| mistake in the press release.
| pessimizer wrote:
| And it seems like they're trying to experiment with new legal
| ways to seize funds, like a $2500 fine for offensive speech:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33062320
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Already rescinded. Please keep up.
| kweks wrote:
| The 2500$ fee isn't rescinded - it was only pulled for that
| specific case.
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