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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

#571

Post by StickyThink »

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…

Had to verify this information.

https://www.merchantmaverick.com/what-is-a-merchant-services...

Seems what they posted above is accurate.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#573

Post by Aeolun »

krisoft wrote: post #388
apeace wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

> 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.

> Why would you reverse it?

Why would you not? Stripe still keeps the transaction cost, so clearly they anticipate this happening.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#574

Post by __d »

bigiain wrote: post #541
tough wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When building out your business, you need to look for possible points of failure, assess the risk of each point, and then consider mitigations.

Payment processing is a possible point of failure. Chances of it failing? I think anyone who's read HN/Reddit/etc would have to evaluate the chances as fairly high. Cost to the business of it failing? Often extremely high.

Having done this analysis, you can look at mitigations: sign up with both PayPal and Stripe, get a merchant account, etc.

Then build the redundancy into your system. Yes, this probably means you cannot use the fancy features because there's no good cross-provider abstraction. That's the cost: you might have to implement recurring transactions yourself.

This happens over and over again. Your individual business is worth basically nothing to your cloud provider, your payments provider, your CDN, your domain registry, etc. They do not care if it breaks.

You have to have redundancy for anything you cannot operate without.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#575

Post by braingenious »

mikece wrote: post #7
droopyEyelids wrote: post #4

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.

Does it matter? PayPal and Stripe don't advertise that they will only do business with organizations with which they agree. To accept a business as a client for a mission critical service like payment processing and then summarily cancel or suspend service without notice should be able to be prosecuted the same as someone who vandalizes a physical storefront to the point they cannot open for business. This is non-tri…

>Does it matter?

That is indeed the question. There is no way of knowing if the nature of the business is a factor unless you know that nature of the business.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#576

Post by matiasfernandez »

This happened to us multiple times too. Everything gets resolved after 1+ months of having our payouts frozen. This means we have to go months without a single dollar being deposited into our bank account. Imagine having bank loans to pay and the bank is asking, "What the hell is going on?".

They need to nuke all their "X Verification APIs" and just manually check each and every account. For us, it was an issue with the Address Verification API not finding our address. As if addresses are a fixed thing and not dynamic. I also felt like I was going crazy because they would trigger it every 3 months or so, even after resolving the issue after speaking for weeks with the support team.

This happened to us in both Stripe and Shopify (which I think uses Stripe as its backend).

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#577

Post by Cederfjard »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #245

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…

Am I missing something? That thread from almost two months ago is about a completely different business. OP linked it in his initial post, mentioning that reading it was what triggered him to post this one, but nothing more than that.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#578

Post by sli »

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…

> Most real payment processors (e.g. banks, merchant services companies) “underwrite” a company BEFORE allowing them to process.

Sounds like there's an opportunity for a Stripe competitor that businesses can somewhat trust to not pull the rug, though that'd be quite the bootstrapping process.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#579

Post by cvalka »

voldacar wrote: post #531
vkou wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The crime of "money laundering" was invented out of nowhere one day. Society predates it by thousands of years.

+1 "Oceania Has Always Been at War with Eurasia"

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#580

Post by honeybadgerdc »

This is exactly what has happened with my Shopify account. All of sudden, they cut off the account and held the money hostage. This was a month ago and they have yet to give me a reason why. I get one email a week from them, and I have responded to each email with all of the information requested. It's really frustrating. I am not doing anything fraudulent... but I must have triggered something in their system. They had no problems with completely shutting down not only my payments but also my website that I've put hundreds of hours into. I plan on reporting them to the BBB.. once I get my account activated and withdrawal the money. I hope you do the same with Stripe.
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