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Tell HN: Stripe brought my business to a dead stop

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

#81

Post by privateSFacct »

supercarson wrote: post #47

Thanks for the article. Could anybody reading this suggest a reliable payment gateway and merchant service .. thanks!

You might want to specify if you will be doing a high risk business such as

* a fitness studio

* recurring memberships

* any type of discount or free trial period.

From stripe's ban list:

"offering substantial rebates or special incentives as an inducement to purchase products or services;"

From a high risk provider:

"The main reason for the high risk tag is use of the recurring billing model for memberships. Customers usually give one-time permission up front for the business to charge them monthly until the customer cancels the membership. If customers skip over or forget about the terms of the authorization form they sign, these recurring charges might come as a surprise, leading them to initiate a chargeback against the business. This is a very common scenario for free trial models that lead into recurring billing. After a free trial, the start of an auto payment plan might catch the customer off guard.

There’s also the possibility of “friendly fraud”—when a customer abuses the chargeback system just to get their money back. Maybe they stopped using the membership and forgot to cancel. In any case, this can also lead to a chargeback against the business."

https://www.bankcardusa.com/health-fitness-merchant-accounts...

If you are going to be doing a business model that is not high risk - none of those items above are a yes - I would reach out to stripe and get things cleared up.

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

#82

Post by maximente »

tempsy wrote: post #56
maximente wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, customer support is anathema towards the sort of insanely scaled platform monopolizing type of stuff that these firms chase. you don't get to be the winner in a winner take all ecosystem being dragged down by individual requests. you do your best to reduce them to acceptable orders of magnitude, and those that do hit the mines get blown up. that's the takeaways from all large scale/VC funded platforms. they just…

Not true. It just depends on the ethos of the company. I wouldn’t call Amazon support “amazing” but it’s clear they have properly scaled their human staff to reasonably accommodate the number of customers they have. Have you ever tried doing the same for a Google product? Guarantee their optimizing for operational efficiency and not customer happiness. At all.

which side of the company? i "dealt" with AWS "support" in the past, where they were super eager to send us a representative and sales deals at the beginning, then it was probably 2 orders of magnitude higher turn around interval when it came to technical issues.

to be fair i'm not sure what their retail help setup is.

we were a small fry spending wise so it's ok, but let's not kid ourselves, they aren't pro-customer after you're on the platform unless you're throwing around serious cash.

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

#83

Post by alam2000 »

privateSFacct wrote: post #81
supercarson wrote: post #47

Thanks for the article. Could anybody reading this suggest a reliable payment gateway and merchant service .. thanks!

You might want to specify if you will be doing a high risk business such as * a fitness studio * recurring memberships * any type of discount or free trial period. From stripe's ban list: "offering substantial rebates or special incentives as an inducement to purchase products or services;" From a high risk provider: "The main reason for the high risk tag is use of the recurring billing model for memberships. Custome…

How about software SaaS which is charging monthly?

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

#84

Post by privateSFacct »

alam2000 wrote: post #83
privateSFacct wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to specify if you will be doing a high risk business such as * a fitness studio * recurring memberships * any type of discount or free trial period. From stripe's ban list: "offering substantial rebates or special incentives as an inducement to purchase products or services;" From a high risk provider: "The main reason for the high risk tag is use of the recurring billing model for memberships. Custome…

How about software SaaS which is charging monthly?

Depends on

1) how easy is service to cancel. Put your cancellation link online not behind a business hours automated phone tree.

2) how trial periods work. Send customer email 3 days in advance to notify them that billing will begin if they don't take action and amount of bill with an easy way to cancel if desired.

Some SAAS I think is always high risk, SEO tools, email marketing, adult services related etc? Someone probably has a better high risk SAAS list. Basically, can someone uses a stolen card, or even their own card and signup for this service, spend $10K blasting emails to people, then claim unauthorized?

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

#85

Post by southbaybox »

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.

Edwin - I have emailed you twice and sent you a message on twitter but haven't heard back from you. Can you please response to my emails??
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