Before anyone gets too excited to talk about their problems with Stripe on HN, please know that my account is semi-banned and anything I post is flagged as “self promotion” after I wrote a negative piece on Stripe that reached the HN front page.
My Stripe Tax Story
101–110 of 299 posts
Re: My Stripe Tax Story
#102My dad owns a successful chain of bicycle stores in Texas. He’s been in business for almost 51 years and he’s one of the largest bike dealers by volume in the country. He has nearly a hundred employees and a bookkeeper. Despite having a proverbial dozen balls in the air at any time and despite having people on the payroll to do bookkeeping, he sits down at his computer every night at home, logs into the ERP system, a…
> he sits down at his computer every night at home, logs into the ERP system, and reviews sales and receipts Sorry, what? How is this OK or even normalized - he should not have to check every single receipt every night. You hire people to do that, and if they cannot do it right, you hire someone else. As OP mentioned, it wasn't a gradual thing, and when you have a lot of customers, it can easily slip through. Even yo…
You are a business owner?
I have similar experiences as the OP. You cannot simply hire someone to oversee such large extend of information and business. Yeah that would be a CEO. But no ceo is willing to do that shitty administration work. Automation could help maybe. But generally it's just you yourself who needs to do it.
Re: My Stripe Tax Story
#103Before anyone gets too excited to talk about their problems with Stripe on HN, please know that my account is semi-banned and anything I post is flagged as “self promotion” after I wrote a negative piece on Stripe that reached the HN front page.
I mean... Have you tried posting links to articles apart from your own medium and twitter accounts?
I think general etiquette with discussion forums is to post links to a variety of sources, not just your own content.
Re: My Stripe Tax Story
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who has used Stripe over the past 5 years for large scale e-commerce and marketplace startups Stripe has dropped the ball quite significantly over the past two or so years. Their customer support has gotten worst, their communication to customers has faltered quite a bit and they're starting to nickel and dime their customers for basic features (like support that responds within a day or two). I wouldn't g…
We send satisfation surveys after support interactions, and consistently over the past year, 8+ out of 10 businesses have rated their interactions highly. But it does sound like we did drop the ball with you, and I'd like to figure out what happened if you could forward me an example at edwin@stripe.com.
In a game of Russian Roulette, 5 out of 6 outcomes are also 100% satisfactory, but those are not the ones that matter.
Re: My Stripe Tax Story
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> he sits down at his computer every night at home, logs into the ERP system, and reviews sales and receipts Sorry, what? How is this OK or even normalized - he should not have to check every single receipt every night. You hire people to do that, and if they cannot do it right, you hire someone else. As OP mentioned, it wasn't a gradual thing, and when you have a lot of customers, it can easily slip through. Even yo…
My dad is not next to me to reply, but your rebuttal patterns a conversation that he and I had many times over the years, when I was first getting my start in business and tried to tell him he was too old fashioned in his business methods. The bottom line is that you absolutely have to be involved in all levels of your business if you want to be successful and don’t want to be taken advantage of by the unscrupulous.…
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Re: My Stripe Tax Story
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In a brick-and-mortar business, closing time is when employees (i.e, non-owners) are in a hurry to get the store cleaned up and shut down so that they can go home. They’re tired and they might feel pressured to just get the sale done. Scammers know this and so closing time is a good time to come in and try to pass off a fake credit card with a stolen number. Weekends, when many less-seasoned employees work, is another popular time.
Re: My Stripe Tax Story
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The fraud indicator in this case is that the card is a dupe, hence why the machine couldn’t read it and the number needed to be manually entered. So when the charge went through, some poor soul elsewhere in the world had to issue a chargeback.
ed: sibling comment nailed it also. Didn’t even consider that, good stuff
Re: My Stripe Tax Story
#108My dad owns a successful chain of bicycle stores in Texas. He’s been in business for almost 51 years and he’s one of the largest bike dealers by volume in the country. He has nearly a hundred employees and a bookkeeper. Despite having a proverbial dozen balls in the air at any time and despite having people on the payroll to do bookkeeping, he sits down at his computer every night at home, logs into the ERP system, a…
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.…
> The SaaS GUIs sort of work for the high level stuff but there's way too much information to decode the Business.
> You get used to it, though. Your brain does the translating. I don't even see the code.
> All I see is up and coming salespeople, valuable customers, strategic products.
> You want a drink?
Re: My Stripe Tax Story
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
I've been working in fintech since 2014, and in tech since 2004.
Whether Stripe's price is worth it is subjective, but something that is absolute fact is that whatever you've built doesn't compare. I can tell you that with absolute certainty, even without having seen any of what you've built.
Consider this. Consider that you don't understand why what you perceive as the added value from Stripe Billing "isn't justified" (despite a LOT of businesses paying for it). Consider that you might be missing something. And you say you haven't even used your service in production yet?
This is a case of "could build the service in a weekend". Hey, have at it, but when customers come to you asking for a billing-related feature and you don't have it because you'd have to build it (instead of toggling a switch in a dashboard), or when your cron fails which causes incorrect billing and costs your business a lot of irrecoverable money (instead of just asking support for a correction), then think back about your choices.
Again, have at it, plenty of businesses do this themselves. But most of them regret it in hindsight, because it's not their core competency and shouldn't be.
Re: My Stripe Tax Story
#110My dad owns a successful chain of bicycle stores in Texas. He’s been in business for almost 51 years and he’s one of the largest bike dealers by volume in the country. He has nearly a hundred employees and a bookkeeper. Despite having a proverbial dozen balls in the air at any time and despite having people on the payroll to do bookkeeping, he sits down at his computer every night at home, logs into the ERP system, a…
> if you let this kind of fuck-up go undetected for over three months, you have to at least assume some of the blame and acknowledge that you probably could have caught it if you scrutinized transactions. I work in eCommerce and occasionally there will be something like a script or config gets messed up and an issue with billing will happen. And being the "expert" I'm usually the one called to fix it. I wish I could…
Well, I am sorry but in my eyes this just shows bad product quality, bad transparance and missing understanding of basic business stuff on the side of the product. The only reason for software to be existing is to NOT mandate users to check stuff manually.