[deleted]
Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business
241–250 of 705 posts
Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business
#242Used to work for a “high risk” payment processor, we inherited tons of accounts that were terminated by Stripe, Square, and PayPal. Here’s one small bit of inside info that may help the newer businesses out there: Most real payment processors (e.g. banks, merchant services companies) “underwrite” a company BEFORE allowing them to process. Underwriting means they look over the business model, financials, etc and make…
Why those web services don't leverage from the fact/data that a real bank has already vetted you? And you use a real visa/mc/ae cards. They anyway block you.
Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's unreasonable to think that a blog post has an easier time gaining traction than a HN comment outside of HN users.
How, other than SEO? If you want to share a link to it, you already can.
More that you can go deeper in context / detail, with images, styling, better links
Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business
#244The worst part about these type of cases is not being able to get a straight answer. There is a whole subset of big tech that has taken the "you must be a fraudster therefore we can't unfuck the situation" approach to customer support. It's an arms race with fraudsters that eventually sucks in legitimate businesses.
IMO it is not the "you must be a fraudster" logic as much as "we have enough other customers that we can burn you without much worry of repercussions". As much as I hate government intervention in business, it really seems like there needs to be a way to force companies to actually be direct, accessible, and reactive in cases like this. I went through something similar with Venmo randomly locking my account after I r…
This seems similar to anti-trust in a way. Taking a wider view of anti-trust, the goal is to keep the market healthy by ensuring there are choices available to consumers; there are no unhealthy monopolies and anti-competitive practices. Well, as a consumer I would like to be able to choose tech products where I can get effective support. Customer support is lacking in some markets, it's not healthy. The anti-trust fix is to bust up a company, but I don't see how that would help here. This is a new economic problem where dominant companies are run by computers and algorithms that serve 95% of the people, but if you're in the unlucky 5% you're screwed.
Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business
#245According to previous posts* this company sells something related to cannibis.
I'd love to know why certain categories are always flagged or silently banned. Cannibis, sex toys, porn, crypto, etc. Payment processors seem to always give these categories the worst service and whenever a company is nuked like this, it's usually one of these categories. Why is that? It almost feels like there's some secret government organization tasked with upholding religious values telling payment processors to fuck with random accounts and swearing them to secrecy. I obviously don't believe that, but it's equivalent to the scale of whatever is going on due to natural causes. I don't believe that these industries are prone to higher than usual fraud. So what is it?
Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business
#246I wish there were better advise but after years of e-commerce experience all anyone will ever tell you is don't use Stripe. Don't use Square,don't use PayPal. Don't use any of the faceless companies for anything remotely critical and for anything that is critical have two backups. Basically that goes for things like hosting, payment processor or anything else your business depends on.
So what do you use instead?
Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've literally never seen a link to an HN comment go viral on social media, such that my non-HN friends would read it. It happens for blog/medium/substack posts all the time.
But for what reason? The styling?
Definitely. HN is suspiciously devoid images. To most people on the internet in 2022 that alone makes it wholly uninteresting.
Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business
#248Reading about these kinds of issues strengthens my belief that ecommerce using stablecoins is the way forward.
Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business
#249Used to work for a “high risk” payment processor, we inherited tons of accounts that were terminated by Stripe, Square, and PayPal. Here’s one small bit of inside info that may help the newer businesses out there: Most real payment processors (e.g. banks, merchant services companies) “underwrite” a company BEFORE allowing them to process. Underwriting means they look over the business model, financials, etc and make…
So if Stripe is one of the best "low risk" processors, who is the Stripe of "high risk" payment processors?
Cash.
Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
seriously you should write this as a blog (or if you are trying to be pseud, let me interview you and I'll write it) if this is SOP it's important information
I’m curious what benefit you think publishing the comment as a blog post would provide over the existent HN comment (which also has its own URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32855106 ). Possibly better SEO?
Good question. Feels like there's two Qs in there: 1) when is long-form better than short form, 2) why write about problems at all?
2. Why write at all: consensus drives policy change, and information drives consensus. Writing, of any length, assembles information, bundles it into an argument, and (if the argument lands) becomes a 'capsule' around which consensus can form.
1. Why long form: room for nuance and research. Long form can include different perspectives (including stripe's -- perhaps they have a reason for these practices). It can address questions like 'what % of the industry behaves this way, what are the downsides to the banks' approach'. The interview + editing process can tease out anecdotes that sharpen the argument, or uncover new aspects of the problem.
This part is selfish, but for the writer, long form lets you improve your own knowledge of the topic, and your ability to make arguments around it.