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Postmates added $70M in revenue and saved $3M in network fees with Stripe

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Re: Postmates added $70M in revenue and saved $3M in network fees with Stripe

#31

Post by eshyong »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #11
staunch wrote: post #7

Alternate headline: Stripe helps Postmates screw their customers out of $70 million > "By intelligently updating the credentials on saved cards that have expired or been replaced, CAU optimizes authorization rates to keep subscription payments recurring seamlessly." This is the shady practice of charging people's new credit card when their old one expires or they replace it to get rid of their subscription accounts.…

In one way, this is exactly the comment I came here to read. The article made my eyes glaze over it was so press-release-y and so I wanted to know what the actual plain language detail is. You delivered that, thank you. However, in the specific case of Postmates, have they actually used this feature to screw people over? I get what you are saying in the case of a subscription like Netflix. But with Postmates, the use…

I think the issue isn't that they're spending money on an order in the moment, it's an auto-renewing subscription that users may not even remember about.

Re: Postmates added $70M in revenue and saved $3M in network fees with Stripe

#32

Post by londons_explore »

edwinwee wrote: post #21
globile wrote: post #2

It is pretty clear by now Stripe has big guns pointed at enterprise customers. What others like Checkout.com, Adyen thought was a relatively safe moat, has now clearly disappeared. However, I'm sorry to always be the sour grapes guy when it comes to talking about Stripe neglecting us SMEs. I'm pretty sure a lot of these things mentioned in the article are being passed down to "regular" customers, but to be honest, it…

Edwin from Stripe here. Postmates started using Stripe as an SME, when they were probably smaller than your company. We’ve been scaling alongside them for the past decade, and the auth optimization features mentioned in the post weren’t built for them—they’re built for and used by businesses of all sizes. In fact, Radar’s ML was designed to become better as the network grows—the more card transactions it sees, the mo…

Why is stripe doing fraud detection, when someone like Visa or MasterCard would have far more data and be able to offer much better fraud detection?

Re: Postmates added $70M in revenue and saved $3M in network fees with Stripe

#33

Post by breakingcups »

wpietri wrote: post #18

As an aside, is anybody else getting spam from Postmates? I gave a tagged email address only to Plex in 2012. They sent me a compromise notice in 2015. It started getting used by spammers in late 2016, with ~4400 spam messages received since then. In the last month or so, Postmates, who I have never used, started spamming that address. I'm now receiving circa one thing from Postmates a day.

Interesting, maybe they have a referral program so now some spammer is masquerading as the real thing to earn some affiliate money?

Re: Postmates added $70M in revenue and saved $3M in network fees with Stripe

#34

Post by rsstack »

staunch wrote: post #16
mc10 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the shady practice of charging people's new credit card when their old one expires Is this really shady? I’d personally find this behavior super convenient.

Imagine being a poor person that gets a replacement credit card expecting to ditch your subscriptions, to get your finances in order, and then getting billed anyway on your new card.

This "life hack", just like doing chargebacks to your gym because it's easier than calling them, isn't valid. Your complaint is an extreme example of https://www.xkcd.com/1172/

Re: Postmates added $70M in revenue and saved $3M in network fees with Stripe

#35

Post by noirbot »

staunch wrote: post #7

Alternate headline: Stripe helps Postmates screw their customers out of $70 million > "By intelligently updating the credentials on saved cards that have expired or been replaced, CAU optimizes authorization rates to keep subscription payments recurring seamlessly." This is the shady practice of charging people's new credit card when their old one expires or they replace it to get rid of their subscription accounts.…

The crux of the question is, I guess, if a renewed credit card (with a new expiration date) is a "new credit card". Presumably this feature wouldn't work if you changed your card to one with a different CC number because it's a new account. If I lose/damage my card and have to get a new physical card, I at least don't think of that as a "new" card in terms of billing. It's not a new account with the card company in a contractual sense.

I understand the issues with some companies making it really hard to cancel a subscription, and I agree that there should be more regulation around being able to unsubscribe easily, but in the abstract, a subscription is a contract to pay X a month for Y service until you give the vendor notice of cancellation under some terms. If anything "canceling" by intentionally voiding your payment information in this way is a hack of the system, and a little unethical, even if it's expedient.

I would guess that, in the majority case, people's subscriptions lapsing due to their card expiring isn't intentional. I know I've certainly had to re-subscribe to a lot of things before, due to my card having to be replaced because of fraudulent activity, and if it could have just automatically incremented my expiration date by a couple months, that would have saved me hours of work.

Re: Postmates added $70M in revenue and saved $3M in network fees with Stripe

#36

Post by kwanbix »

gingerlime wrote: post #23
globile wrote: post #2

It is pretty clear by now Stripe has big guns pointed at enterprise customers. What others like Checkout.com, Adyen thought was a relatively safe moat, has now clearly disappeared. However, I'm sorry to always be the sour grapes guy when it comes to talking about Stripe neglecting us SMEs. I'm pretty sure a lot of these things mentioned in the article are being passed down to "regular" customers, but to be honest, it…

Yes I feel roughly the same. Our experience as an EU stripe merchant with charging US cards is pretty great though. 97%+ acceptance if I recall... Brazil however is a very sore point. We hope to localize to Spanish and reach Latam though so we’re a bit worried. We heard it’s better than Brazil. We’re still a tiny B2C though, so we definitely feel the complicated marriage side of things. Not to mention PayPal. The mis…

For Latin America, the best option is MercadoPago (Market Pay)I believe. I have no relation to them by the way.

It is from the same company that created MercadoLibre (Market Free) which originally was a clone of ebay. MercadoPago is a clone of Paypal.

Mercadolibre/Pago is worth about 51.000 billion dollars today.

Again no relation.

Re: Postmates added $70M in revenue and saved $3M in network fees with Stripe

#37

Post by edwinwee »

londons_explore wrote: post #32
edwinwee wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edwin from Stripe here. Postmates started using Stripe as an SME, when they were probably smaller than your company. We’ve been scaling alongside them for the past decade, and the auth optimization features mentioned in the post weren’t built for them—they’re built for and used by businesses of all sizes. In fact, Radar’s ML was designed to become better as the network grows—the more card transactions it sees, the mo…

Why is stripe doing fraud detection, when someone like Visa or MasterCard would have far more data and be able to offer much better fraud detection?

The card issuers do their individual basic fraud detection (e.g. security code) but we built our own on top after users asked for something more advanced. Imagine Stripe seeing data across all the card networks, compound that with customer info (like email or IP, which card networks don’t always collect) across all businesses on Stripe, then that’s fed into our ML network that’s constantly tuned by Stripe engineers. And then businesses have the opportunity to customize all that with Radar.

Re: Postmates added $70M in revenue and saved $3M in network fees with Stripe

#38

Post by jawns »

rsstack wrote: post #34
staunch wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine being a poor person that gets a replacement credit card expecting to ditch your subscriptions, to get your finances in order, and then getting billed anyway on your new card.

This "life hack", just like doing chargebacks to your gym because it's easier than calling them, isn't valid. Your complaint is an extreme example of https://www.xkcd.com/1172/

The way you describe it, switching to a new credit card is a slightly easier way to get rid of a recurring charge than going through the proper channels and calling to cancel a subscription, and people who do so are just being lazy.

But in reality, many companies make it nearly impossible to cancel a subscription, even when the customer has the right to do so. I have experienced cases where the only way to cancel is to call a designated phone number, but you're put on indefinite hold by the phone system and can never actually get through to the person who can cancel. Or you need to fax a cancellation request, and somehow the system never actually processes it, despite repeated attempts.

So, in these cases, cancelling an old card is an act of desperation, not an act of laziness.

Re: Postmates added $70M in revenue and saved $3M in network fees with Stripe

#39

Post by rsstack »

jawns wrote: post #38
rsstack wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This "life hack", just like doing chargebacks to your gym because it's easier than calling them, isn't valid. Your complaint is an extreme example of https://www.xkcd.com/1172/

The way you describe it, switching to a new credit card is a slightly easier way to get rid of a recurring charge than going through the proper channels and calling to cancel a subscription, and people who do so are just being lazy. But in reality, many companies make it nearly impossible to cancel a subscription, even when the customer has the right to do so. I have experienced cases where the only way to cancel is…

It was a loophole that happened to work but that's not one of the design objectives of the credit card system. It isn't Postmates', or Stripe's, or Visa's fault that some companies refuse to let you cancel (ahm... Shipt...). They don't need to make the card replacement process _worst_ for everyone just because of those few bad companies, when they have a different process for dealing with non-cancelling subscriptions (dispute with your bank and show you attempted to cancel - ahm... Shipt...).

Re: Postmates added $70M in revenue and saved $3M in network fees with Stripe

#40

Post by avipars »

staunch wrote: post #7

Alternate headline: Stripe helps Postmates screw their customers out of $70 million > "By intelligently updating the credentials on saved cards that have expired or been replaced, CAU optimizes authorization rates to keep subscription payments recurring seamlessly." This is the shady practice of charging people's new credit card when their old one expires or they replace it to get rid of their subscription accounts.…

If they didn't have a clickbait title, the post wouldn't be as interesting
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