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Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#291

Post by yaythefuture »

trollied wrote: post #179
jessaustin wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since HN is a community, you might have more luck getting this fixed if you posted this with your regular username? Never mind this suggestion if you have previously posted "sketchy" opinions that would harm your business, although you may be past that point now...

Agree. The OP account was created today. If it was a long-standing user with lots of comment history, then I’d be more inclined to wonder what was going on etc. Creating a new account on here to potentially get support is just plain wrong, and needs dealing with IMO. Should never hit the front page.

The problem is that my real HN account is my actual name. It'd be like 2 clicks to figure out what my business is.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#292

Post by pc86 »

yamtaddle wrote: post #265
eropple wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a while since I dealt with this side of ecommerce - how can you have several payment processors, and rotate them, without having to handle card data yourself? (Most folks aren't really equipped to do that.)

display_cc_form_that_handles_cc_data_so_we_do_not_have_to() { which_one = random_number(3) switch which_one { case 1: display_authorizedotnet_form() break case 2: display_stripe_form() break default: display_paypal_form() } } Plus the same integration work for each one that you'd have to do anyway (which may be little or none if you're using a platform that integrates all of them via plugins or settings or whatever)…

It's been a long time since I've worked in eCommerce but at my last ecom role we used two payment processors and simply stored the card data with both for every customer, and the relevant IDs in the customer record in the database. Whenever anything got charged we'd check which processor we were supposed to use and off we went.

Yes this has an increased cost if your processor charges by number of customers, but I don't think that's particularly common - these two were just revenue + monthly fee.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#293

Post by theptip »

elliekelly wrote: post #239
vertis wrote: post #87

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.

I hate seeing comments like this because Stripe’s hands are tied here. Anytime a bank or payment processor has frozen or shut down an account and you’re getting stonewalled it’s almost guaranteed to be an AML related issue and it’s against the law for them to tip a customer off that their account is being or might be investigated for suspicious activity. This isn’t Stripe deciding that you’re a fraudster and so you’r…

> it’s against the law for them to tip a customer off that their account is being or might be investigated for suspicious activity

What law do you think forbids this? In my experience running global payments through multiple rails, on an OFAC/risk ping you typically get a request for enhanced due diligence, which normally looks to the payee like “send me a picture of your drivers license”.

The most common result is that O Bin Laden (matching the OFAC list) is actually Oscar bin Laden; with further info you disambiguate the payee from the OFAC listed entity and are allowed to transact.

I have never encountered a reg that says you are obliged to ghost your customer.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#294

Post by apeace »

mgkimsal wrote: post #230
apeace wrote: post #198

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.

The funny part is, I thought that if I did a bunch of real transactions and then reversed them all, that our account might get flagged!

That's in addition to explaining to our investors that we ended our launch day at -$1,000 due to all the chargeback fees because some dumb developer doesn't know what a testing environment is. And in addition to the fact that Stripe recommends against you testing in that way.

I did get a full end-to-end experience, in my production environment, with literally one variable changed: using the testing Stripe API key instead of the production one.

I don't know, it didn't seem like a crazy way of testing at the time. When you consider that the testing environment worked perfectly, and there was no indication, whatsoever, anywhere that we would not be able to charge cards, it kind of felt like how you're supposed to do it.

But clearly I was wrong :) The way you find out if your account has any issues is by charging a real card, and if it works, reversing it, and if it doesn't work, waiting a couple weeks with no information on what's going on. Lesson learned!

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#295

Post by pc86 »

redeeman wrote: post #133
senko wrote: post #56

This is bad. There are more and more Stripe horror stories like this, and from an outsider perspective it looks awfully like PayPal behaved back in the day (probably still does but I'd never touch it again as a merchant). I have positive experiences with using Stripe in my last startup and we're currently building Stripe integration on another, which will process about 50% of our revenue (the other payment method bei…

I have personal knowledge of more than one instance where stripe totally screwed over small companies and simply decided to ignore any contact for more than half a year, withholding the money and putting everyone in limbo. yeah, im sure its a minority of accounts at stripe, but seriously, do not take the chance!

Not to mention the several instances where pc will come into threads like this and outright lie about reaching out to customers, or will ask them to reach out then ghost them again, etc.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#296

Post by Dylan16807 »

fourstar wrote: post #58
iLoveOncall wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was just last month that all of the big players in the cryptocurrency space blacklisted all addresses that have ever interacted with TornadoCash from using their services, essentially transforming that monopoly money into even less than monopoly money. Crypto is not at all decentralized.

Uh, yes if you use Circle (centralized), Coinbase (centralized), etc etc. Get your coins off of exchanges and learn how to actually use crypto with the way it was intended.

Sure, you can sell the coins off an exchange. But they're worth a lot less if so many entities won't touch them.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#297

Post by pessimizer »

collyw wrote: post #268
layer8 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How, other than SEO? If you want to share a link to it, you already can.

Name a blog post that has stuck with you because you learned something useful. Could you search for it and find it easily? Now do the same for an HN comment.

I'm pretty confident I could find any HN post that I remember with the search box at the bottom, or by googling it with site:news.ycombinator.com.

With, half of the blogs that I liked I can't remember the name of the blog, it's probably either been dropped from search engine indexes for being older than a year or two or pushed to the 10th page by better SEO, or the site has simply vanished.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#298

Post by hartator »

joecot wrote: post #238
orionint wrote: post #121

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…

The difference is between the company having their own merchant account with a bank (which is what most large companies do) using an online payment gateway, and not having one and leveraging the processor's instead (which is what Stripe, Paypal, etc provide). When you apply for a merchant account you get that approval and underwriting, but with a hefty application fee for obvious reasons. If your payment gateway shut…

Interesting. What will be the provider you recommend? Any local banks?

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#299

Post by candiddevmike »

WalterBright wrote: post #225
orionint wrote: post #121

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…

I also learned the hard way to never rely on a single payment processor. It was an expensive lesson. Of course, being thick-headed, I had to learn this lesson twice before it stuck. Always have at least two payment processors. If you've got a lot of money on the line, get a third lined up, too.

How do you handle recurring subscriptions with this setup?

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#300

Post by mikece »

JohnFen wrote: post #211
mikece wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was banned by PayPal once because I didn't sign up with an SSN or EIN and proceeded to make enough to trigger a review because they couldn't file a proper 1099-K on me. This was an oversight on my part and I offered to correct the situation by submitting any documentation they needed -- photo ID, SSN, prior year tax returns to PROVE that I was paying tax on the revenue coming from PayPal, the new LLC and EIN I had…

But at least you knew why you got banned!

Only the first time. They never told me why my other accounts -- which were following all of the rules -- were frozen.
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