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My Stripe Tax Story

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Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#91
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Remediations” often refers to exactly that. Would suggest we wait for an update from the author to see how Stripe handles that, if at all.

doesn't remediations imply accepting fault? wonder if there's legal grounds here. OP posting here could also be legal documentation in discovery

And working in good faith to resolve the merchant's problem and rectify the issue can often prevent a lawsuit in the first place. You're overthinking it.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#92

He wasn't collecting address information for US customers, so the invoices hung in a pending state. He didn't check to make sure the integration was working correctly until a customer emailed him to ask why they hadn't been billed three months later, so there were a lot of invoices to clean up, which he apparently found to be very annoying.

You don't normally have to give Stripe location information for US customers. The problem happened when he enabled tax support for Canadians. Enabling tax support in Canada breaks US subscriptions... who knew. > I built out my Stripe Tax integration, made sure I had all the addresses I needed for my Canadian customers (Canada is the only jurisdiction I run my business, and therefore only need to charge tax to Canadia…

He didn't enable "Stripe Tax for Canada". He enabled Stripe Tax.

The whole selling point of Stripe Tax is that it calculates tax for customers in every supported location. It needs customer location to function. He's supposed to charge tax in other locations where it's required too.

Using Stripe Tax to only handle tax for customers in the home region of the company when the company also sells outside the home region seems like a strange goal.

Missing the forest for the trees.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#93

Tangental side note, I googled profitwell (mentioned in the gist) and the first result is an ad for another competing company (that I won't mention) which includes "profitwell" in the title tag. Super shady!

This is a common phenomenon sometimes referred to as the Google tax. Which is why when you search for "company name" you still get ads for that company when the first actual result is their website, they bid on their own name so that competitors don't appear ahead of them.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#94

I also had issues with stripe's automatic tax. We use stripe's subscriptions with free trials but don't collect credit card details up front, preferring to make sign up simple and low friction. Automatic tax is charged at 0.5% of each transaction, and apparently a trial ending is considered a transaction even if the user has no payment method, so we were hit with automatic tax fees for every trial end even if we rece…

> I discovered in actually using them has made me realize how much effort they put in to marketing to developers

I think the problem is. When I used them like 5-6 years ago, their offering was absolutely legendary. So much so that I happily moved over from 1.5% fees on Authorize to 3% on Stripe.

Right now? It’s basically become everything it seemed to be fighting against in the past.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One more thing to add to this: scrutinizing transactions isn’t just for catching bad stuff. It’s also a way to spot the good. For my dad, it’s a way to spot up-and-coming salespeople who are punching above their weight, for noticing high-dollar sales to repeat customers and making sure that those folks are well cared-for. It also tells him what bikes are selling well and helps him make strategic decisions for buying.…

Poring over individual transactions sounds like a terrible, if not impossible, way to identify aggregate trends

Then you underestimate the human ability to recognize patterns.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#96
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect, because I have been in a similar situation before, that the author is frustrated because the company first ignored/downplayed the significance of his concern, then blamed his issue on user error (without accepting responsibility), and then quietly modified their documentation and addressed the issue as if they had "just discovered it". When companies behave this way it feels like you're being gaslit, which…

Tech support gaslighting. Perfect encapsulation of the phenomenon. Someone make an urban dictionary entry.

Interestingly enough, I vaguely remember a pg article about how Lisp was so effective he could deploy fixes during a customer support call about the issue, to the point the customer thought they had messed up instead of the application. I can’t seem to find that now, but this one is close (in praising Lisp’s speed advantage for startups):

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#97
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author mentions "functionally 1/3 of my customers" and "I can not stress how much this has f*cked over my business." Since they also mention that they would like to hear what people think about this situation, here's my take: They deployed a major change/migration to their billing system, implementing a brand new product, and seemingly didn't bother to investigate how it was going beyond cursory looks at a dashbo…

I'm going to repeat what I said in a parent comment: > But what is your definition of "check to make sure the integration was working correctly"? Once you know what was going wrong, it's easy but unhelpful to say "you should have checked to see if that thing was going wrong". I'm sure he checked that Canadian tax was working, because that's what he bought Stripe Tax for. He didn't expect it to silently screw up his U…

In what world does he not have to pay tax because the customer is in the US? You have to comply with tax regulations where the customer is located. And that is the problem that Stripe Tax helps with.

If you only sell locally then it's not exactly hard to implement and stay up to date with the requirements where you live.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#98

I don't know how Stripe's dashboard looks/works, and whether it easily displays the number of invoices left in "draft" state. But when the author writes about the silent failure here, > No failed API calls (as far as I could tell). I can't help but wonder whether that "as far as I could tell" is carrying a lot more weight than it might first appear. Stripe's documentation under "Collect taxes for recurring payments"…

The goal of Stripe is to make things simple. I shouldn’t have to implement a webhook to discover that none of my invoices are actually being paid. I’d expect a notification email to be sent to the account until that is explicitly turned off.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#99
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does he catch credit card fraud? What does it look like?

Here’s a real example that happened to him a few years ago. He was out of town on business and there was a big sale, around $15K if I recall, to a customer from Mexico. The sale was done just before closing (something he saw in the review) and the card was manually keyed in. The story was that the guy’s card “wasn’t reading” so the employee keyed it in manually, a huge red flag. The charge went through but of course…

Could you explain why a big sale just before closing is an indicator of fraud? I don't understand.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still — charging 0.5% for a cron job?! [edit] I’m willing to be educated, please tell me how this isn’t Invoices with stored payments (which I’ve now seen has an additional fee too)

Stripe Billing is much more than a cron job. It's an end to end solution for invoicing. It includes emails, trials, hosted billing and subscription management pages, PDFs, and a lot more.

I've implemented IAP -- and it is eons better than the 8 calls it takes to do any of this in Stripe. By the time you get done writing and handling the numerous API calls, errors, checks, etc for this, you've basically built the cron without storing the card information and having to do full PCI of your own gateway, which is exactly what Stripe offers as their service, everything else is window dressing.

I say this, still about to use it in production. It upsets me that the amount of work I have to put in to getting Billing working doesn't seem to justify a percentage price. A set fee, sure. Riding along with my services' value? No.

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