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Stripe banned us for payment disputes but we never had a single dispute

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Re: Stripe banned us for payment disputes but we never had a single dispute

#221

Post by danielmarkbruce »

hippich wrote: post #195
pc wrote: post #108

(Stripe cofounder.) Ugh, apologies. Something very clearly went wrong here and we’re already investigating. Zooming out, a few broader comments: * Unlike most services, Stripe can easily lose very large amounts of money on individual accounts, and thousands of people try to do so every day. We are de facto running a big bug bounty/incentive program for evading our fraudulent user detection systems. * Errors like thes…

> Stripe can easily lose very large amounts of money on individual accounts, and thousands of people try to do so every day. Not sure what case you refer to, but in our case someone was able to place multiple clearly (in my own hindsight) fraudulent orders on our woocommerce store. And it wasn't Stripe who lost on these chargebacks - it was us. The only way for Stripe to lose money in such scenario if seller (us) wou…

You figured out a way to do it (and people will set up businesses solely to do this) without having to think too hard. The creative things fraudsters will do is pretty wild. The time horizons they'll work on is also surprising - sometimes they move fast, sometimes they are quite patient and pose as an established business. And... sometimes they start out legit and then go to fraud when their business starts failing.

Give these guys a break - they are trying to onboard customers as fast as possible to reduce the headache involved. The only way to do it is automation. There will always be cases where things go wrong.

Re: Stripe banned us for payment disputes but we never had a single dispute

#222

Post by wting »

Spare_account wrote: post #59
Zarathu wrote: post #17

I really feel for the author. We had once decided to participate in Stripe's Identity Verification beta. After submitting the form to request participation, Stripe's system locked our account pending verification. We were fortunate in that we had a backup payment gateway integration "just in case", because otherwise we would have been completely unable to accept any payments at all for a full week. That week was stil…

>We were fortunate in that we had a backup payment gateway integration "just in case" This seems like the key point here. I'm not a software guy or even a payments guy, I'm a network infrastructure engineer. For anything that we want more than 99% uptime, we put in two of everything, sometimes more. Two separate service providers, ideally coming down different physical paths where practical.

It's not possible to increase availability with redundancy in all cases, because not all financial actions are idempotent.

For example, sending money via a banking wire. If the bank goes down, you can't send a second wire through another bank without loss because the first wire is not retractable.

Re: Stripe banned us for payment disputes but we never had a single dispute

#223

Post by m11a »

albrewer wrote: post #216
mikepechadotcom wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to say that, but the fact that founders have to post on Hacker News to get necessary support from Stripe in case something like this happens, gives the impression that your reply is just reputation damage control, and nothing will actually change.

> and nothing will actually change If nothing changes, people will move away from Stripe on to something else. I'd say stuff like this is exactly how a business that wants to stay alive needs to react to swiftly and figure out the root cause for. The communication from the founder or representative needs to reflect the commitment to change and show the plan they intend to execute. The GP didn't do so well on the seco…

Not really. Stripe has a better platform than competitors, and even though its support isn’t a strong point it’s still better than competitors (which admittedly is not a very high bar). It’s probably much better for large businesses who have their own contact/account manager at Stripe etc.

Last time I contacted Stripe I was given a round circle between departments, the department responsible denying the issue and/or sending me to an unrelated department (who had a good agent but, as expected, admitted she couldn’t fix the issue even though she recognised its existence). In the end it turned out to be a bug in Billing that was eventually fixed (per the dev IRC) but support denied there was any bug and kept giving bot-like responses. It was ridiculous. Stripe should probably improve its support, but even if it doesn’t it’ll probably do just fine.

Big tech and developed ‘startups’ are famous for bad support. Consider Coinbase, which barely responds, PayPal, which is useless, or Google/FB, which don’t even provide a contact option except in limited cases (eg GSuite for Business issues).

Re: Stripe banned us for payment disputes but we never had a single dispute

#224

Post by rajeevk »

invalidusernam3 wrote: post #163
pc wrote: post #108

(Stripe cofounder.) Ugh, apologies. Something very clearly went wrong here and we’re already investigating. Zooming out, a few broader comments: * Unlike most services, Stripe can easily lose very large amounts of money on individual accounts, and thousands of people try to do so every day. We are de facto running a big bug bounty/incentive program for evading our fraudulent user detection systems. * Errors like thes…

> We actually have an ongoing project to reduce the occurrence of these mistaken rejections by 90% by the end of this year. I think we’ll succeed at it. (They’re already down 50% since earlier this year.) More important than that is provide a way for people to get this revolved without having to make the front page of HN.

Only a few HN posts can make it to the front page. Only if you are lucky then you will be able to raise your voice through here. So I assume there would be many users out there affected like this and their issues were never resolved.

Re: Stripe banned us for payment disputes but we never had a single dispute

#225

Post by effingwewt »

pc wrote: post #187
oconnor663 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One particularly frustrating aspect of fraud prevention is that fraudsters are better than the rest of us at getting human support staff to do what they want. They have way more practice, and they learn techniques that work from other fraudsters.

Right. It's a hard problem. That said, we think we can get better.

Let me help you.

Stop relying on HN/Twitter as coalmine canaries and hire human fucking support.

This trope is ground into the mud by now.

You don't get to outsource customer support, or better- nix it entirely and then act all shocked shit like this happens.

'Oh no I have no idea how this happened, even though this was the exact plan when we went to email-only suppprt'

If the entire road you have paved is one big crack in the ground, it's less like customers falling through the cracks and more like a city being swallowed up in an earthquake.

It should be made law if you are a payimg customer companies should have to offer customer support that the customer can actually understand.

Doordash and UberEATS are two of the worst companies in the US, and yet even they have (garbage, to be sure) customer service.

You guys cut all corners in the name of the Holy Profit. So why the hell should we cut you slack when you fall in the pit you dug.

Aww how cute you downvote me immediately with not a word of rebuttal.

I'm sure because there is literally no excuse for this bullshit behavior. Im fine eating fake points to call you out on it.

Re: Stripe banned us for payment disputes but we never had a single dispute

#226

Post by aquark »

mgkimsal wrote: post #219
GiorgioG wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like companies can't seem to get their act together to offer some kind of rapid escalation/remediation service. Maybe it's time for legislation to force their hand. This could potentially cost a business a ton of money (and affect a non-trivial number of employees) in the process.

Would 'paid' support help? Like pay, say... $150 up front, which is refunded (partial or all) depending on the outcome (error on their end, you get refunded?) It runs the risk of turning 'support' in to a profit center, I support.

While not ideal, I think this is a great option.

Microsoft (used to?) offer this for developer support and I remember using it maybe 15 years ago where it was a couple of hundred bucks to open a ticket but you got quick access to a real expert and good escalation.

If the issue turned out to be their problem the ticket was refunded.

For something business critical like this it is a way of signaling to the company that there is clearly somethin wrong with the automated process: a real scammer won't pony up hundreds of $ to get a review they would fail.

Re: Stripe banned us for payment disputes but we never had a single dispute

#227

Post by noasaservice »

m11a wrote: post #223
albrewer wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and nothing will actually change If nothing changes, people will move away from Stripe on to something else. I'd say stuff like this is exactly how a business that wants to stay alive needs to react to swiftly and figure out the root cause for. The communication from the founder or representative needs to reflect the commitment to change and show the plan they intend to execute. The GP didn't do so well on the seco…

Not really. Stripe has a better platform than competitors, and even though its support isn’t a strong point it’s still better than competitors (which admittedly is not a very high bar). It’s probably much better for large businesses who have their own contact/account manager at Stripe etc. Last time I contacted Stripe I was given a round circle between departments, the department responsible denying the issue and/or…

> Stripe has a better platform than competitors

.... If you weren't disabled by an automated system, and "customer support" (probably another level of shitty ML) continues to double down.

I concur with mikepechadotcom that this is simply a one-off damage control via "Social Media Escalation".

Re: Stripe banned us for payment disputes but we never had a single dispute

#228

Post by Tomte »

go_blue_13 wrote: post #213
Tomte wrote: post #125

Welcome to the Stripe support forum! No, I don't blame you for trying and I'm glad you've got attention, but don't people think it should be possible for all those founders, CEOs and other Stripe luminaries to trawl their own support channels?

Do you have an issue with them reading HackerNews and responding to a relevant post? Its not feasible for the CEO of a huge company to review every support ticket, no

This happens all the time. Go search for Stripe problems here.

Re: Stripe banned us for payment disputes but we never had a single dispute

#230

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #218
falcolas wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only exists as long as the post gains enough attention to get to the front page. Which doesn't happen for every post - not even most posts - which makes it an exceptionally poor avenue of support.

[deleted]

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