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Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

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Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#441

Post by chihuahua »

tmpz22 wrote: post #218

Just a reminder while this may seem like a Good vs. Evil clash between OP and Stripe we will never have all the facts. OP does not enumerate their business model or go into details about their customers and transactions. Stripe absolutely should not share internal customer information. While we may see Stripe chime in the thread, and make summary judgements, we will almost surely not have total visibility (and thus c…

It's easy to forget the firehose of fraud attempts that platforms like Stripe, PayPal, etc must be dealing with 24 hours a day. I assume that's what's behind most of these unfortunate incidents. Not that there is fraud in this case, but this could be one false positive among billions of true positives.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#442

Post by londons_explore »

krisoft wrote: post #409
londons_explore wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buying your own products inflates revenue figures (and is therefore pretty much prohibited in listed companies). Many investors don't like it either. 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...

I smell a made up problem. Do you really think the CEO of Chipotle can’t buy a burrito from one of their branches without accountants getting a heart attack? They just walk in and buy one. They in their personal capacity end up richer by a burrito and some invaluable experience. The company ends up richer by the price of a burrito. If this kind of “revenue inflation” matters to anyone then either the CEO has a bad bu…

Where I worked, the CEO would walk in and get a free burrito. It's another kind of headache (technically that burrito is pay, and needs to be taxed and declared as CEO pay), but that was considered preferable to revenue inflation which is fraud rather than dodging taxes.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#443

Post by catapart »

notch656a wrote: post #386
catapart wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No - this would be an example of GETTING fucked by a company, BECAUSE you trusted them. Which is exactly the kind of thing we write laws about; you shouldn't be able to get fucked because you believed what a company told you. You should only be able to get fucked by a company because you agreed to the penalties of how they intended to fuck you, should you break that agreement, and proceeded to intentionally and/or ma…

Sometimes when fucking happens, both parties did the fucking. Betting the farm on Stripe should never be the modus operando of a 'standard enterprise' and thank god I have never worked with anyone in any position of power over money that shared your beliefs. That is just insanity.

Running a successful business that is intrinsically tied to a well-known or well-trusted institution is not only common, it's the case for the majority of businesses. Which is WHY we have consumer protection (it's not to protect your typical "consumer", it's to protect the money interests of business people). How many businesses do you think could survive a disruption to their banking access? Or maybe their internet access? Electricity access? These things get laws to guarantee their functionality, even though they're private industry, because keeping businesses running is pretty important.

So no, in no universe is it rational to believe that trusting a resource to deliver on their promises is, in any way, "fucking yourself". You're just projecting your paranoia onto others as a mechanism for rationalization. You have the privilege of living with backups, and pretend that it makes you more reasonable than others, because it boosts your ego while simultaneously satiating your paranoia. It's fine - I always carry a full sized spare tire in my compact car. Inconvenient and hardly used, sure. But it stifles my paranoia about the many times I've needed to ad-hoc replace a tire. And has saved me more trouble than I can quantify. That doesn't mean people who can't afford a full-sized spare are 'fucking themselves' by not prioritizing it over, say, other or less-costly needs. It just means that I have privileges they don't.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#444

Post by comprev »

arjvik wrote: post #246
hattmall wrote: post #177

I 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?

Payment processors exist for customers who were rejected by Stripe/PayPal/etc.

I had a client who was a processor and they used banks in Malta at the back end.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#445

Post by ValentineC »

theflyingkiwi42 wrote: post #369
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…

That's how AMEX shut us our corporate credit card account overnight. We launched a new shopping cart and tested it live in production with our own AMEX card. Mind you that we used that card for over $250k a month (never a late payment) and this was a $99 charge that we simply forgot to refund. No appeal process, nothing. Caused significant short term cash flow issues. So be very careful using your own card.

AMEX used to have major issues with consumers trying to "pay" themselves — the Singapore version put me in financial review for a PayPal transaction that I had accidentally paid to the wrong address, and was subsequently cancelled and refunded — which to AMEX looked like I was trying to "pay" myself.

I don't know if that's still the case, but these days I'm wary about using AMEX on any sort of money transfer service.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#446

Post by phpthrowaway99 »

Stripe has an office in San Francisco. I definitely don't recommend trying to go inside, but I really wish people would organize protests at these business locations. If hundreds of people protested outside stripe for canceling customers with zero communication, maybe the employees would notice.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#448

Post by brightball »

gingerlime wrote: post #258
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if ChargeBee bans you, you are still dead because that's a single point of failure. No, you should have several payment processors, and rotate them regularly to check they work.

Besides being a single point of failure, we tried to switch to ChargeBee and found them to be pretty lacking (to put it mildly). The platform looks nice and has lots of options, but under the hood things seem pretty fragile. Horrible docs, random 500 errors that weren't showing on the status page (and support ignored until more customers reported it), our Stripe gateway disconnected and the system still appeared to b…

Fwiw, I’m just using them as an example. There are likely plenty of other options.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#449

Post by CogitoCogito »

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…

Wouldn’t that only apply to investigations by e.g. Fincen? How many of these are just internal risk triggers by Stripe? Why would they have to stonewall you in those cases?

(Obviously it’s quite difficult to know the ratio of cases like these involving government investigations and those involving their own internal risk procedures.)

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#450

Post by borski »

naasking wrote: post #422
brk wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Making competition easier in this space is another way to solve it. If Stripe had 15 competitors all of whom were API compatible so you could switch in 5 minutes, any bad PR would drive customers away in droves. Government has made entry to this space hard which is why there aren't enough competitors, so they're really the source of the problem.

Might be time to build an analytics.js equivalent, but for payment processing. A single API lib that you can then use to process payments with Stripe, Braintree, etc.
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