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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

#541

Post by bigiain »

tough wrote: post #406
joecot wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone uses WooCommerce for their store, they have 79 different payment integrations, including Stripe, Paypal, Amazon Payments, along with merchant account gateways like Authorize.net. Some of them are paid extensions but rather cheap considering the use. https://woocommerce.com/product-category/woocommerce-extensi...

What Im talking about is to add another abstraction layer, so you can have both payment processors and decide which use on the fly, both integrated with any ecommerce framework you use

You're still going to have some grief is you sign up 2 years worth of customers to recurring subscription via Stripe and then have them pull the rug out from under you. Sure you can switch to your backup processor(s) for new customers, but you'll need to go back to all your existing subscription customers and ask them to re sign up to their recurring subscriptions with the new processor.

Its much harder to engineer a payment abstraction layer with recurring payments where you're not relying on Stripe's subscription features that are not migratable to another payment processor.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#543

Post by mgbmtl »

yamtaddle wrote: post #479
mtmail wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stripe advises against that (I'm not saying it makes sense) "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." https://stripe.com/docs/testing

It's bullshit. Anyone with experience testing things in this area is 100% gonna try a real card at least after any major changes (and certainly before a launch of a new product). You aren't actually sure it's right (and so, with something so entirely connected to revenue, can't go the fuck to sleep) until a real charge has gone through. They probably mainly just don't want people running shitloads of automated-test c…

Refunds used to be free, but for a few years now Stripe keeps the transaction fees.

Although I guess doing lots of refunds would mess with anti-fraud and other systems.

I just do special pricing/discounts to do a $5 transaction (too small could look like credit card fraud).

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#544

Post by nfca »

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…

This has been very informative. My gratitude to everyone who has elaborated on how underwriting works with these providers.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#545

Post by rglover »

phpthrowaway99 wrote: post #489
rglover wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I typically support the "punk rock" approach, this isn't good to suggest. All it takes is one unstable person going cocoa puffs for someone to get hurt or something bad to happen.

Do you feel this way about all protests? Or just ones based around protecting people's incomes?

This isn't about protecting people's incomes, it's about bad customer service.

Just you saying that makes me say it's a bad idea because that framing in itself is emotionally charged which increases the odds that protest could turn into violence/physical intimidation. That's not terribly wise when there are alternative options for payment processors available.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#546

Post by w-ll »

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!

Another good reason to do a Live charge even for subscriptions (add a coupon code to make it like $1 if you really need to) but is to test the credit card expiring after the fact. I've done a lot of billing code an none of the sandboxes really let you test a card that works for N months, and then expires.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#547

Post by 10g1k »

NetOpWibby wrote: post #532
10g1k wrote: post #529

Western payment processors have proven in recent years that they will cancel/unperson anyone who doesn't fit with their political ideology. This is not the first instance of it happening. And it may not be any actual wrongthink; it may merely be perceived wrongthink or programmatically determined wrongthink. Because of this, I strongly recommend connecting to Asian payment processors. Even Chinese is more reliable th…

Any specific recommendations?

https://ikajo.com/blog/the-most-popular-payment-methods-in-a...

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#548

Post by bigiain »

sgc wrote: post #499
apeace wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I still got caught when I did that once. $1 worked just fine. The first real customer $249 charge failed. :-(

Test in production. Do real dollar value tests. If you can test with different cards with different security levels, try a Visa 3D Secure and a 2FA Amex charge. Personally I do them and then get reimbursed (or do them directly on a company credit card) rather than start out a production payment history with refunds, not sure if that matters but I figure if it does it's got to be a bad signal so I may as well avoid it.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#549

Post by lmm »

tremon wrote: post #315
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 curious why you would still consider them a trustworthy business partner after what happened?

They might still be the best of a bad bunch. Payment processing is a de facto cartel (probably driven by it being an actual cartel at the Visa/Mastercard level).

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#550

Post by lmm »

vkou wrote: post #492
naasking wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Except the operationalization of those rules is: here are some vague guidelines that you have to follow, and if we don't like you we'll retroactively decide you were committing a crime even if you followed those guidelines to the letter. See HSBC for a case in point.

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