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TELL HN: Stripe STOLE OUR $159k

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Re: TELL HN: Stripe STOLE OUR $159k

#31
post #28

One bit of advice for your post: Talk a bit more about your business model - where the funds are coming from etc. It is coming for your customers (other businesses) or their customers (the shoppers)? I understand Stripe is keeping money you believe should be released to you. But hard to form an opinion over something with very little context. "Unauthorized charges" seems to imply that Stripe believes you've not commn…

I can explain with all details: Let's day you are an ecommerce store and you have your own Stripe connect. Now you need customers who likes to buy shoes, you signed up from bringshopper.com and we worked with you and started to bring shoppers you targeted through our dashboard. We did Fb ads, Google ads. When those shoppers come and pay from your website, it is your Stripe account that does transactions not ours. Our Stripe account takes application fees from your transactions due to us bringing all those shoppers. So we are not charging anyone, you connect your Stripe account to ours via stripe standard connect and we take application fee if we brought you shoppers you targeted. Our funds are coming from application fees we took from each transaction. If you check our Stripe account, it has 0 charges as we don't charge customers. So we have no charges to be refunded/disputed, additionally if you look at stripe.com/connect/pricing you will see Stripe Standard Connect platforms that use direct charges are not responsible for refunds/disputes of connected accounts. Which means, if you as a store did something wrong and Stripe should refund your charges, or you get disputes, this has nothing to do with our services, we are not financially responsible to cover your Stripe account

Re: TELL HN: Stripe STOLE OUR $159k

#32

Edwin from Stripe here. I’d like to dig more into what happened — could you email me at edwin@stripe.com?

Hello Edwin Our team did from support@bringshopper.com 2 days ago. Subject is "Urgent not getting paid" Did you find it? Our account id is acct_1K7t9JC4s1I9dR5f

Ah, yes—sorry, I remember now. And I see the team did re-review your account after that and we sent another email with the results of the investigation. I can't publicly share details of a Stripe account on HN, but that conversation we had in our email thread still stands—I'm afraid the way you use Stripe Connect and your business model are unsupportable.

Re: TELL HN: Stripe STOLE OUR $159k

#33

Several red flags and this is nothing against you. * New domain * no phone contact * lack of information * No seo data, inbound links or domain score merchant companies will hate this kind of stuff and quite honestly 159k in charges in 3 ish months probably set off red flags too if i understand your marketing materials it sounds like you run a browser plug-in all very sus to be honest

We are not transacting $159k ourselves, we had connected other stripe accounts collectively generated $159k. Our business is B2B. For example, if you use our platform and your business makes 1M in a month, we will make similar amount

Re: TELL HN: Stripe STOLE OUR $159k

#34
post #12

I understand your frustration, that sucks. On a side note: Is this kind of business relation the result of unequal partners where one-sided benefits are incentiviced? Is building a product the new product?

Both sides get benefits. We basically bring new shoppers to your ecommerce store. You get new users and if they come back and pay again, we only charge ~1%, if they paid the first time, we charge higher fee depending on our costs. So you benefit by connecting your Stripe account to ours and gaining new shoppers, we benefit because we charge percentage of transaction as a fee and generate revenue

Sorry, I meant between you and stripe

Re: TELL HN: Stripe STOLE OUR $159k

#35
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both sides get benefits. We basically bring new shoppers to your ecommerce store. You get new users and if they come back and pay again, we only charge ~1%, if they paid the first time, we charge higher fee depending on our costs. So you benefit by connecting your Stripe account to ours and gaining new shoppers, we benefit because we charge percentage of transaction as a fee and generate revenue

Sorry, I meant between you and stripe

We increase volume of other stripe accounts connected to us. When there is high volume, Stripe makes higher revenue

Re: TELL HN: Stripe STOLE OUR $159k

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello Edwin Our team did from support@bringshopper.com 2 days ago. Subject is "Urgent not getting paid" Did you find it? Our account id is acct_1K7t9JC4s1I9dR5f

Ah, yes—sorry, I remember now. And I see the team did re-review your account after that and we sent another email with the results of the investigation. I can't publicly share details of a Stripe account on HN, but that conversation we had in our email thread still stands—I'm afraid the way you use Stripe Connect and your business model are unsupportable.

I understand but how could we get our funds released? Can you at least email about this?

Re: TELL HN: Stripe STOLE OUR $159k

#38
post #19

Stripe has a lot of “restricted businesses” for which they don’t want to process payments. https://stripe.com/legal/restricted-businesses This one jumps out to me as a possible reason, if your business is helping new businesses acquire customers: > Sales of online traffic or engagement It could be any of those though, it’s hard to say. Basically Stripe is trying to protect themselves from being hit by a bunch of char…

[deleted]

Re: TELL HN: Stripe STOLE OUR $159k

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello Edwin Our team did from support@bringshopper.com 2 days ago. Subject is "Urgent not getting paid" Did you find it? Our account id is acct_1K7t9JC4s1I9dR5f

Ah, yes—sorry, I remember now. And I see the team did re-review your account after that and we sent another email with the results of the investigation. I can't publicly share details of a Stripe account on HN, but that conversation we had in our email thread still stands—I'm afraid the way you use Stripe Connect and your business model are unsupportable.

Honest question: do you not determine that during onboarding/account signup? Or do you do warm onboarding wherein essentially everyone is accepted and some vetted later on?

Re: TELL HN: Stripe STOLE OUR $159k

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, yes—sorry, I remember now. And I see the team did re-review your account after that and we sent another email with the results of the investigation. I can't publicly share details of a Stripe account on HN, but that conversation we had in our email thread still stands—I'm afraid the way you use Stripe Connect and your business model are unsupportable.

Honest question: do you not determine that during onboarding/account signup? Or do you do warm onboarding wherein essentially everyone is accepted and some vetted later on?

Whatever they do is not working, we built feature to make sure stripe is not losing money by covering negative balances from as budget automatically but they blocked us and didn't pay
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