281–290 of 705 posts
It sucks this happened to you, but like with all the PayPal hate stories, I notice you're very careful not to describe what type of business you operate.
I don't think your judgmental paranoia is founded.
The 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.
It's the YCombinator startup way: scale large enough so that you don't have to worry about customer complaints until they threaten to go public and generate enough press to cause real damage. But in all seriousness, being a YCombinator startup is now a big red flag outside of the VC-funded bubble. My current employer, and the previous one, have strict no-YC policy for SaaS due to numerous issues with previous YC comp…
As executives and purchasing managers get more tech-aware I think we're going to see an increase in due diligence into who is running companies, who their investors are, what other companies they've invested in, etc. Brands like YC will end up getting punished (and all their portfolio companies, by extension) for the bad actors.
I had a very similar experience, except it was on our launch day . We hadn't charged a single live customer yet, but we had done plenty of tests using the Stripe testing environment. So we go live with a huge launch event, and we have customers signing up in droves. When they get to the last step -- payment -- they get an error. Logging in to the dashboard I didn't see any indication that there was anything wrong wit…
> Next time I build something with Stripe I'm going to test it in production before launching I'm genuinely curious why you wouldn't have done that anyway? I pretty much always do, precisely so I can experience a full end to end user experience.
Sure, you can do it, but you'll have to forever have a note in your accounts package saying 'this revenue isn't actual revenue'.
It really upsets those who want the accounts to match up to the cent at the end of the year...
At what point does it make sense to sue these companies to compel them to answer these questions? I know, that's expensive... but I'm willing to contribute to a legal fund to make payment processors answer questions.
Corporations that provide critical services that would otherwise be hard to find elsewhere (Stripe, perhaps) use these legal threats to completely shut their customers out of their closed ecosystems. If you hold them to account, you pay a stiff penalty on the other end being denied access to the services they monopolize. And you are very likely compelled to operate using their arbitration schemes and you will have no…
Looks like they've already paid that penalty
This is why we need a decentralized Internet payment system, like email. This was a non-controversial opinion not long ago.
I had a very similar experience, except it was on our launch day . We hadn't charged a single live customer yet, but we had done plenty of tests using the Stripe testing environment. So we go live with a huge launch event, and we have customers signing up in droves. When they get to the last step -- payment -- they get an error. Logging in to the dashboard I didn't see any indication that there was anything wrong wit…
> Next time I build something with Stripe I'm going to test it in production before launching I'm genuinely curious why you wouldn't have done that anyway? I pretty much always do, precisely so I can experience a full end to end user experience.
"Do not use real card details. Testing in live mode using real payment method details is prohibited by the Stripe Services Agreement. Use your test API keys and the card numbers below."
Used 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So if Stripe is one of the best "low risk" processors, who is the Stripe of "high risk" payment processors?
There is no such thing. High risk means high transaction costs, high underwriting costs, and lots of insurance/legal/compliance work. Your best bet is to pay the slightly higher fees by going directly through your actual bank.
According 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 org…
Re: porn, the issue is its sky-high chargeback rates.
Bad actors have massive incentive to try all sorts of insanely advance schemes to ensure their cash flow (I saw this both at MP3.com and Zynga early days). As a company, Stripe has massive incentive to stop them. If you stop 95% of bad actors and cause .01% of good actors to get caught up in the enforcement, that’s a net win for the company. If I was running Stripe, you’d be an acceptable casualty.
Of course to you, you’re not an acceptable casualty and this is a shitty situation. The advice in this thread about having multiple processors you can switch between is a technical and financial headache for you to implement, but it’s really your best bet.
I’m sorry you’re going through this, I hope it works out, but the tough love call here is you are an acceptable casualty and need to plan accordingly.