(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.
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.
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.
> 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".
I don't think you're disagreeing with patio11 here. To wit:
> 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*.
I read that as: they prioritize satisfying the immediate, dissatisfied customer first and address process improvement second, which is exactly the priority that you're suggesting. Especially combined with patio11's other suggestion of personally contacting the upper management of the company.
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”.
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.
Customers shouldn't have to bother random employees to get support on critical issues. In general I think Stripe does a pretty good job with support compared to other big tech firms - the inability to reach humans is problem endemic throughout the industry.
It's a shame because a good customer support interaction can create a serious evangelist (hard to quantify but extremely valuable). Maybe Stripe knows this because they put a lot of effort into appeasing the HN community (many developers/entrepreneurs who make processor purchasing decisions). I wish they'd apply this attitude to all their customers.
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.
A business is a structure of people, and my intuition is to achieve healthy dynamics, people should treat it like this kind of parasocial relationship.
If you fuck up, I should forgive you as long as you're not an asshole about it. However, it seems like a recurring theme, that modern tech companies don't actually provide support. If that's not in line with the economics of the situation, maybe I'm wrong to hold it against the company itself.
But maybe the cost of this model is hidden from the consumer, and I'd rather pay a bit to have reliability and fairness. I don't know how much I'd have to pay, but I'm willing to guess it's palatable, or at least in the neighbourhood. If we are being tricked by these hidden costs, it's better (if you can) to move on, there are people trying to compete even if it's a difficult industry to break into. Try not to get locked in. If I were running a small business, I'd definitely be discounting crypto payments and putting the extra work into handling whatever regulatory complications arise, vs yelling at the walls that are the infinitely scaling tech companies
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.
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!
> 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?
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.
What does it matter if it's one-sided? Reading the complaints and the seqience of events give me perspective on whether something like that could happen to me as a platform user.
In the real world, I am not going to get Patio11 to respond as he's doing here. I'd get a CSR rep working off a script. So I don't really care what the CEO's POV is.
it mostly applies to 'personal information'. it applies to transactions if they're 'end customer' transactions (customer's customer). And per 3d in the policy, 'consent' is a basis for data processing, so stripe could ask to comment publicly on the dispute, and then the customer could let them
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>>>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.
It honestly seems like it would have been fine if they had been like "you tripped our fraud detection, and because the payment was made with a CC money will be held in escrow until the dispute period ends. There's no point in providing documentation because customer can still issue a chargeback."
> 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... .. . )
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.
They seem to be using stripe to process transactions for a cell phone stores, but the $3300 transaction is for selling a van. I guess this tripped some fraud prevention system.
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.
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."
Makes sense why this would raise a red flag, but it does not explain why Stripe supposedly had extremely shitty customer service where he can't get talk to a person and get this resolved in less than a week or two (let alone 120 days that is actually arbitrarily indefinite).
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.
The issue is that the credit card company doesn’t necessarily run through a full legal analysis of the seller’s rights in a transaction when the buyer requests a chargeback.
Of course it may eventually all get settled in the seller’s favor in court, but in the meantime the buyer has their vehicle and their money back and it’s on the seller to track them down and sue.
So people tend to do person-to-person used vehicle purchases in cash-equivalents (cash, cashier’s check, etc) so that there’s no worry about the money disappearing after the buyer drives over the horizon.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
until it doesnt work. Yeah, they may well be fast in the support of what essentially is a sales support.
Talking to insurance companies is also extremely pleasant, almost giving a vibe of talking to yes-men and shoeshine boys... until its time to make a claim :)
I feel confident most strip customers never have issues, but when you do, you are screwed. They simply do not care at all, they even feel perfectly justified simply not responding for months
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.
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
> 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
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.
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?
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
I feel it is only fair to point out that Stripe might be a dirty rotten liar, too.
I don't think you're disagreeing with patio11 here. To wit:
> 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*.
I read that as: they prioritize satisfying the immediate, dissatisfied customer first and address process improvement second, which is exactly the priority that you're suggesting. Especially combined with patio11's other suggestion of personally contacting the upper management of the company.
Dead Comment
Your customer service strategy is really "go to a small internet forum that only some startup nerds know about and find my email address"?
It's a shame because a good customer support interaction can create a serious evangelist (hard to quantify but extremely valuable). Maybe Stripe knows this because they put a lot of effort into appeasing the HN community (many developers/entrepreneurs who make processor purchasing decisions). I wish they'd apply this attitude to all their customers.
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.
But maybe the cost of this model is hidden from the consumer, and I'd rather pay a bit to have reliability and fairness. I don't know how much I'd have to pay, but I'm willing to guess it's palatable, or at least in the neighbourhood. If we are being tricked by these hidden costs, it's better (if you can) to move on, there are people trying to compete even if it's a difficult industry to break into. Try not to get locked in. If I were running a small business, I'd definitely be discounting crypto payments and putting the extra work into handling whatever regulatory complications arise, vs yelling at the walls that are the infinitely scaling tech companies
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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.
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Dead Comment
Bit of an understatement, right?
https://www.kalzumeus.com/
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.
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?
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.
In the real world, I am not going to get Patio11 to respond as he's doing here. I'd get a CSR rep working off a script. So I don't really care what the CEO's POV is.
https://stripe.com/privacy
it mostly applies to 'personal information'. it applies to transactions if they're 'end customer' transactions (customer's customer). And per 3d in the policy, 'consent' is a basis for data processing, so stripe could ask to comment publicly on the dispute, and then the customer could let them
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Square is one. https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-api
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.
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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?
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.
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.
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.
https://docs.klarna.com/
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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.
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... .. . )
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/wa1zob/dont_...
"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
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.
Of course it may eventually all get settled in the seller’s favor in court, but in the meantime the buyer has their vehicle and their money back and it’s on the seller to track them down and sue.
So people tend to do person-to-person used vehicle purchases in cash-equivalents (cash, cashier’s check, etc) so that there’s no worry about the money disappearing after the buyer drives over the horizon.
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.
In this case, my judgment (as a small business that uses Stripe for similar-sized SaaS payments) is that they acted completely reasonably.
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.
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.
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.
And honestly I feel like Stripe actually responds to support tickets that are related to the integrations side in like half an hour.
Talking to insurance companies is also extremely pleasant, almost giving a vibe of talking to yes-men and shoeshine boys... until its time to make a claim :)
I feel confident most strip customers never have issues, but when you do, you are screwed. They simply do not care at all, they even feel perfectly justified simply not responding for months
I too am a little suspicious of anyone who codes in PERL
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What does a business soundness have to do with stripe robbing them?
Is this meant to defend Stripe?
What a weird way of looking at things.
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.
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