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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

#491

Post by tharne »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #487
tharne wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wouldn't be surprised to find it is most insurance companies. In the U.S. I guarantee you that most insurance companies are NOT doing this. What this company is doing is called "Bad Faith" in insurance jargon. And the penalties for this sort of behavior are enormous, and can even include the possibility of the company losing its license to sell insurance in a particular state. > The insurance industry as a whole…

LOL, wait until you hear about ERISA and learn that everything you just said is wrong for most employee insurance plans and that you can't even get damages when they act in bad faith.

> LOL, wait until you hear about ERISA and learn that everything you just said is wrong for most employee insurance plans and that you can't even get damages when they act in bad faith.

We may be talking past each other here. I was referring to property and casualty insurance in my comment, while it sounds like you're talking about health and disability insurance. Two completely different worlds and regulatory frameworks.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#492

Post by vkou »

naasking wrote: post #477
vkou wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government hasn't made entry to this space hard, the banks that Stripe partners with have. Because they don't want to deal with high-risk transactions. They are the gatekeepers here, and Stripe has to bend over backwards to make them happy. They'd much rather burn individual customers, than jeopardize their entire business.

Certain banking regulations make those transactions "high risk".

Some of them are due to government regulations like 'don't launder money' and 'don't process money for illegal activities'. Which are, like, basic operations of society 101 level stuff.

Others (adult services) are not due to government regulations, they are there simply there because banks don't want to deal with chargebacks.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#493

Post by sgc »

justinc8687 wrote: post #426
candiddevmike wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you handle recurring subscriptions with this setup?

You use a 3rd party payment orchestration platform. Spreedly and Very Good Security both offer this and we use them for our business.

I am not familiar with this. What makes them less of a single point of failure?

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#494

Post by abigail95 »

smoovb wrote: post #234
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…

So if Stripe is one of the best "low risk" processors, who is the Stripe of "high risk" payment processors?

CCBill

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#495

Post by dylan604 »

londons_explore wrote: post #442
krisoft wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is were some fucking common sense needs to break out. If the CEO at a food chain cannot legitimately eat there like a regular customer, then we've got some jacked up bullshit regulations. If the CEO is driving to each branch and order 1000 items, then sure, that again should be common sense of something.

More and more, we just keep acting dumber as "tech" is more and more engrained

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#496

Post by iio7 »

So, this is another "drive by" on Hacker News about Stripe, which @edwinwee (from Stripe) reacts to and "saves the day".

All the while the rest of us know absolutely nothing about what just happened!

What exactly is going on? What is the business model? And why does it require that these cases reach Hacker News before they are solved by @edwinwee!?

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#497

Post by zhengyi13 »

ryandrake wrote: post #256
WalterBright wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep, as I was reading OP's story I kept waiting to get to the part where he switched to his backup payment processor and life went on. My brain: "You do have a backup payment processor, don't you? Don't you??" If you're running a business and you find that it is utterly dependent on some single point of failure, you'd think that would be something you'd want to correct ASAP.

I used to work in technical/customer support for an internet payment gateway. The esoterica of internet payments are pretty out there; most of the people who called us just wanted to sell their widgets -- they barely understood what we were talking about when we'd ask them where they had their merchant bank account.

... which is to say that, yes, you and I as people who work deeply in a space, of course we know this thing is a SPOF. Everyone else? They don't know that. It took me a long time to acquire the empathy needed to talk them through this stuff, but it made me a better communicator, and it helped an awful lot of them understand.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#498

Post by mminer237 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #396
mminer237 wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with your point, I think banning redheads would violate Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

No; hair color is not what that legislation covers. It is entirely legal in the United States to discriminate against redheads, or people whose names start with B, or Hacker News users, or people who enjoy skiing.

You could discriminate against people with dyed hair colors, but I find it hard to believe that any court would say that a person's natural hair is not a physical characteristic of a national origin group.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#499

Post by sgc »

apeace wrote: post #393
krisoft wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> charging a real card, and if it works, reversing it Why would you reverse it? If you can’t afford to consume one unit of whatever you are selling are you really in a good place to be in that business? I guess there can be rare exceptions where the business sell only a handfull of high ticket items. But then again probably Fincantieri does not let you put your bespoke mega yacht on a card through a web transaction.

We are an internet service provider and we charge a monthly fee for our service. So the real thing I would've been doing was reversing the first month's charge and then cancelling the recurring subscription. Which is exactly what I'd recommend you do if you are launching a new subscription service on Stripe!

Just make a hidden $1 subscription and cancel it without reversing it, then deactivate the item.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#500

Post by easrng »

elliekelly wrote: post #247
layer8 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It uses images for the upvote/downvote arrows, the Y in the header, and the spacer gifs in the table layout (yes, HN uses table layouts)
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