Tell HN: Stripe brought my business to a dead stop • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell HN: Stripe brought my business to a dead stop

#61

Post by southbaybox » Fri, Sep 20, 2019, 9:48 PM UTC

Wow - I didn't expect this many responses - seems like I'm not the only one who's experienced the same issue. Quick answer to some of the comments here:

- We DO NOT have ridiculous membership commitments w/ auto-renew. Our membership is month to month (unless you've prepaid for 6 or 12 mos). - It's been approx a week since I received the email suspending my account. At first, I tried to contact support by chat or phone, but it seems that when they suspend an acct, they block your ability to contact support by any method except by email...of which I sent approximately 8 with no response. I realize it hasn't been that long, but we're a small operation - I can't afford (literally...cannot financially afford it) to let this drag on for weeks or months w/o a resolution of some sort.

Quick update - After sending an email to Edwin@stripe, I got a response within the hour. Thank You Edwin. This was the reply:

"Unfortunately, we will only be able to accept payments for xx for a bit longer. Stripe can only support users with a low risk of customer disputes. After reviewing your business and account information, we've found that your business presents a higher level of risk than we're able to work with.

As noted above, your service will not end immediately—we understand that moving away from Stripe can take time. To help with the transition, we are able to provide you five additional days (beginning today) to switch to a new provider. Because of the elevated dispute risk here, your account balance will be placed on reserve for the next 90 days, the industry-standard period during which most payments are disputed. During this time, the reserved funds will help cover any disputes or refunds on your account. The remaining balance will transfer to your bank account at the end of this period[1]."

Not really telling me anything new - we're not a "high-risk" industry (according to Stripe's list) and have not had any disputes or chargebacks AT ALL. Be that as it may... But I still CAN'T REFUND PAYMENTS TO CUSTOMERS!

Re: Tell HN: Stripe brought my business to a dead stop

#62

Post by sarcasmatwork » Fri, Sep 20, 2019, 9:48 PM UTC

Following.. I have stripe integrated into one of my apps and so far I really like it. No probs in the many years working with this company. I'm happy to see someone from stripe is reaching out.

Re: Tell HN: Stripe brought my business to a dead stop

#63

Post by effingwewt » Fri, Sep 20, 2019, 10:25 PM UTC

I just want to point out that from my perspective the fact that this was flagged, and Stripe magically replied to the post here as opposed to getting back to them through customer service, on top of the fact they just took on so much investor money- this just screams Paypal 2.0

Re: Tell HN: Stripe brought my business to a dead stop

#64

Post by mynameisvlad » Fri, Sep 20, 2019, 10:34 PM UTC

sjs382 wrote: post #57

mynameisvlad wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter if it was the first or last response. A person shouldn't have to post on HN to get proper support. Actually good support would have resulted in this post not needing to be made.

You're adding a lot of bias, unconscious or otherwise. "have to" and "need" are strong words that I don't think you're in a position to use here. Maybe didn't "have to" and they were just panicking. Maybe this post didn't "need" to be made.

I'm not in a position to use specific words to form my opinion? Did we get teleported to a dictatorship that I didn't know about? I can use whatever words I want to say what I want to say, and I know you're not in a position to stop me here.

Good customer service means that the issue is dealt within the standard support pipeline. That clearly failed, based on the wording of the post, especially mentioning that they received no response from support on the matter.

The fact that OP got support once they called Stripe out on social media, while great for OP, is not something to be admired because it means many people are also likely falling through the cracks and just giving up instead of reaching out on other channels.

Re: Tell HN: Stripe brought my business to a dead stop

#65

Post by continuations » Fri, Sep 20, 2019, 11:06 PM UTC

bprater wrote: post #37

Folks have been complaining about Paypal in the same way. You buy yourself some safety as a company if you separate your payment gateway from your merchant accounts. For instance, Authorize.net allows you to bolt on a merchant account, but retains the tokenization of the customers digits. So if one merchant account was restricted, a quick phone call to Authorize.net would allow you to switch over to another ready-to-…

Who do you recommend for payment gateway and for merchant accounts?

Re: Tell HN: Stripe brought my business to a dead stop

#66

Post by paulddraper » Fri, Sep 20, 2019, 11:08 PM UTC

privateSFacct wrote: post #22

andrewstuart wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should not be the outcome. It should not be necessary for someone to come to an online forum and complain to get the customer support issue resolved. Stripe customer support organisation should actually resolve customer issues. Tech companies go on and on and on and ON about "culture", but one thing I can tell you truly needs to be built into culture is customer support. For example, everyone knows Google's cult…

I've called Amazon around AWS issues and I have to disagree with you. They even seem to step outside of support boundaries when troubleshooting things (which they shouldn't do). I pay for the lowest level of service I think - $100/month. Light user. We also only are getting one side of story. Not to knock on a gym - but I'd be interested in the membership plan rules - some of fitness memberships should be flat out il…

AWS support is good, particularly if you get on the phone.

I had one guy work the better part of the day with several phone calls to get to the bottom of my non-critical issue.

Not all experiences have been excellent (I think they could head off half my tickets if their status page would just be accurate), but Amazon is far from the "do humans actually work there" category.

Re: Tell HN: Stripe brought my business to a dead stop

#67

Post by jsnell » Sat, Sep 21, 2019, 12:00 AM UTC

jppope wrote: post #10

edwinwee wrote: post #2

I work at Stripe. Could you forward that email to me at edwin@stripe.com and I can investigate what happened? I'm really sorry for the trouble.

y'all are on the customer service! Out of curiosity... is this automated or were you just kicking around on HN?

I hope you also read the original poster's follow-up message elsewhere in the comments. Apparently the amazing support they could offer was a five day migration period before they cut off all payment processing, and also keeping 100% of the money hostage for three months. And of course not answering the central question of just what were these unauthorized payments, if there are no chargebacks.

Do you still feel like commending them for amazing customer service?

Re: Tell HN: Stripe brought my business to a dead stop

#68

Post by whamlastxmas » Sat, Sep 21, 2019, 12:32 AM UTC

southbaybox wrote: post #61

Wow - I didn't expect this many responses - seems like I'm not the only one who's experienced the same issue. Quick answer to some of the comments here: - We DO NOT have ridiculous membership commitments w/ auto-renew. Our membership is month to month (unless you've prepaid for 6 or 12 mos). - It's been approx a week since I received the email suspending my account. At first, I tried to contact support by chat or pho…

Stripe really sucks for this and it's discouraged me from using them in the future. That said, small gyms are likely a high risk business for charge backs because despite how well you run yours, many of them are predatory or scammy or generally just awful.

Re: Tell HN: Stripe brought my business to a dead stop

#69

Post by tomhoward » Sat, Sep 21, 2019, 12:48 AM UTC

save_ferris wrote: post #41

andrewstuart wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should not be the outcome. It should not be necessary for someone to come to an online forum and complain to get the customer support issue resolved. Stripe customer support organisation should actually resolve customer issues. Tech companies go on and on and on and ON about "culture", but one thing I can tell you truly needs to be built into culture is customer support. For example, everyone knows Google's cult…

> I think tech companies are bad at customer service because the founders have rarely worked front line Customer service rep turned engineer here. I think this true, but I also think that so many founders just don’t care about customer service. Investors are far more interested in new customer acquisition than retention, so naturally more resources are going toward customer acquisition. Customer service is an afterth…

> Investors are far more interested in new customer acquisition than retention

Good investors (I.e, the ones who make investments that turn out to be successful) care a lot about retention, as it’s the strongest indicator that the product/service being offered has enduring value/appeal.

Re: Tell HN: Stripe brought my business to a dead stop

#70

Post by grippy174 » Sat, Sep 21, 2019, 1:26 AM UTC

That sucks. But how do we know that you aren't a fraudster? You haven't told us the name or URL of your business.

There's a lot of incentive for fraudsters to put pressure on payment processors with fake stories on social media. Their hope is that the processor re-enables their account so they can continue charging stolen credit card numbers.