221–230 of 461 posts
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What is this, really? Is this meant to defend Stripe? What a weird way of looking at things.
A single instance of holding 3k doesn't seem like (or shouldn't be) a significant amount for a small business.
(I work for Stripe, and since many of my colleagues are currently sleeping, taking the liberty of saying this on their behalf.) We are looking into things. As someone who ran businesses for a long time myself, it would be very alarming to me if customers felt they were being ignored while repeatedly talking to people who work for us. If that ever happens, please bring in literally anyone at Stripe, inclusive of other…
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The issue is Card payments and the networks they use. Doesn't matter if lightning settles transactions instantly if the customer wants to pay with Visa and Visa allows funds claw back for ~180 days.
Normally a stores merchant account is kept open, so if a transaction is charged back a month later (and the bank and visa aggree with the chargeback) the money can be recovered from future sales. If the stores merchant account is closed because of "reasons" the payment provider can either use the funds the store has yet to cash out from the the payment provider as "insurance" against chargebacks until the deadline passes (at which case its safe to cash out) or start invoicing the store you just told to GTFO as a merchant to try and get the money back and then go recovery paths which is much more a nightmare for payment providers.
I'm not saying I agree with the polices, just that I understand why they are in place, the payment providers are just covering their own asses at the end of the day.
I couldn't read the story, as it has been deleted from reddit and maybe I am missing something here, but why don't these companies offer reliable one-time human support for a suitable fee?
> I used Stripe for about a year to run a small cell phone store in Denver, CO area. In the case of my business, I never had an issue processing my small payments for cell phones, ranging from a couple hundred dollars up to $1000. All of a sudden, we run a charge for $3300 because our primary processor in my business was down, and we had a large transaction to fulfill. Stripe flagged the transaction and is now holding the money from me for "at least 120 days"
> It is one thing to say this is a red flag, fine... I hear you... no problem. a transaction multiple times the size... sure. I get it. However A normal payment processor would then query you for documents authorizing the charge, bank statements, financial statements, some sort of procedure to remedy the issue. Stripe provides NO SUCH METHOD TO RESOLVE these issues.
> I am concerned because there are reports of Stripe continuing to add "30 days" to the reserve hold past the initial 120 days, indefinitely. One article detailed a hold that was surpassing its 240th day. Stripe is taking advantage of a lack of regulation in this space to steal small merchant's large transactions. They see a big, outlier transaction and lick their chops, hiding behind KYC and "Fraud prevention" To hold your money indefinitely.
> You cannot call Stripe. They do not have a phone number. Their support page on their website has Phone call and messaging grayed out. You can only email. If you email, you get robots. Even in the same email thread, a different "agent" (with a different name and everything) answers each time with not prior knowledge of your history. There are no ticket numbers to your support request; nothing tracking it. The robots respond with what is quite obviously a template response.
> If you do a little bit of research about this topic, you immediately see this is a prevailing issue. Reports of Stripe taking up to $31,000 are all over the internet! Again, Stripe gives no manner to remedy this. There is NO ONE you can call. NO ONE you can talk to. More disconcerting, it seems that anyone who posts about this issue on reddit gets downvoted and teamed up against by established Reddit accounts, that I have to imagine are owned by Stripe. These account have some established reddit history on them, mainly talking about coding in PERL. It's a little sus. In my case, I sent my EIN letter, Sales Tax Receipt, Articles of Org, Statement of Trade Name, Certificate of Good Standing, Bank Statements, Website links, Signed transaction receipts, and anything I could think of to Stripe to review. I just received robot-responses; never got anything cleared up.
> I challenge reddit to connect me to a human being at Stripe that can tell me how to resolve the issue. I'm convinced It can't be done. This is a big problem and should be brought to the attention of small business owners, and regulators!
> TL;DR : I used Stripe to process my business transactions. They saw a large transaction come through and used their twisted TOS to steal $3,000 from my small business. They use gray area contract loopholes to be able to hold your money from you indefinitely. While you lose out on your working capital and ROI, they collect free interest on your money; potentially never returning it.
The readers arrived and so did the card but for some reason I could not get the card to read, I kept getting back an error code of "6" [0] telling me that the card could not be read. If I scanned a real card it would scan and then fail when trying to auth the payment (understandable, I was in the "test" environment) but to me this proved the reader was working. I did some testing in "live" and all my cards were read/charged without issue. I opened a ticket with Stripe on May 6th.
I had a similar "new rep every message" as the person in this Reddit post and my ticket would often go days/weeks without response (other than me begging for help). I followed every single instruction they sent, I provided all the debug info they asked for, I shot 4+ videos of the issue, nothing. Around June 2nd (almost a month after starting this process) I complained on Twitter and Stripe Support reached out (this did nothing, it might have gotten me a useless reply on the ticket but no real help). A Stripe employee also reached out directly to me via DM and we started an email conversation resulting in them just sending me 5 Stripe Test Cards to see if maybe it was just my card that was broken. About the same time Stripe sent another M2 reader and another Test Card (Note: in the interim I bought 16 readers for my event and had tried multiple of them to no avail, I was pretty sure it wasn't a problem with the reader and told them as much).
I got all the new hardware and recorded a long video of me testing 3 M2 readers and 5 Stripe Test cards in every combination 3 (readers) x 5 (cards) x 2 (methods, dip/tap). I used their sample app and their sample backend (a ruby app running in a docker container) just to rule out any of my code. Same error every single time.
I reported my results to both the employee and my support ticket and got no help. Support didn't reply, the employee talked about sending me card they had on their desk that they knew worked but that conversation petered out and I didn't want to bug someone who was going out of their way to help me. 10+ days would go by and I'd beg and plead for help in my support ticket with no reply, this repeated multiple times.
Finally, on July 25th, 3 days ago, almost 3 months after starting this journey, Stripe replied to my ticket:
> We have figured out that some of our Terminal physical test card inventory did not work.
No. Fucking. Shit. This is something I suggested about a million times. All my cards had the same serial/batch/something number on the back and I had speculated it could be a bad batch and asked them to send me an opened/used card that they knew worked and/or check the number on a working card, they ignored all of this.
They sent me 3 replacement cards and they sit next to me right now on my desk, unopened. My event is in 2 days and I don't have the time/energy to test them right now. All my energy is on testing the full setup on production but I might lose my mind if these are broken as well. My curiosity just got the better of me and I opened a card and the numbers on the back are different so that gives me some hope (all 7 cards I got from Support/buying myself had the same number).
This is only 1 instance of shitty Stripe support, I have 2 others that I won't get into right now. I still love their docs/sdk/dashboard but I really wish their support was better.
[0] https://stripe.dev/stripe-terminal-ios/docs/Enums/SCPReaderD...
(I work for Stripe, and since many of my colleagues are currently sleeping, taking the liberty of saying this on their behalf.) We are looking into things. As someone who ran businesses for a long time myself, it would be very alarming to me if customers felt they were being ignored while repeatedly talking to people who work for us. If that ever happens, please bring in literally anyone at Stripe, inclusive of other…
> I work for Stripe Bit of an understatement, right?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As I have observed in other contexts ( https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1463749947858165761 ), many people who say "Ugh, I cannot reach a real human" have in fact spoken to several humans, repeatedly and at length, and are imprecisely stating their desire to speak to a person who would agree with their view of the facts and swiftly enact the resolution that they prefer. We offer (human-powered, somewhat obviously?)…
In this specific case, the OP claims that the call and chat options are greyed out, leaving only e-mail and social media. E-mail, they claim, is bot responses only. While I understand you can't comment on the specifics of this case, can you speak generally about whether or not disabling the phone/chat support buttons is a part of some standard process?
Sometimes, a financial institution might only be able, due to staffing or other considerations, to deal with you asynchronously in writing, perhaps from e.g. a group of professionals who are not as numerous as front-line user operations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sympathetic that 3k can be huge for small businesses, but if you can't tolerate a loss of 3k, isn't your business practically doomed?
It depends on the business model. For a high margin business, it might be fine, but for a business that has slim margins, it could significantly reduce the amount of product they can buy over the next quarter, which could make net margins negative.
This is not acceptable from a critical infrastructure vendor.
That anyone is willing to reveal just how obtuse they are by attempting to justify it is astonishing.
(I work for Stripe, and since many of my colleagues are currently sleeping, taking the liberty of saying this on their behalf.) We are looking into things. As someone who ran businesses for a long time myself, it would be very alarming to me if customers felt they were being ignored while repeatedly talking to people who work for us. If that ever happens, please bring in literally anyone at Stripe, inclusive of other…
Your customer service strategy is really "go to a small internet forum that only some startup nerds know about and find my email address"?