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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

#581

Post by matiasfernandez »

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?

We've been moving away from Stripe and Stripe-backed (e.g. Shopify) payment gateways pretty much everywhere we can for this same reason. We only have a few integrations left connected to Stripe, specifically one with Tripleseat, which we use for our event management and have not migrated yet. Choosing Stripe has been the most costly decision we've ever made and we're not a small company nor a startup.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#582

Post by cvalka »

ceejayoz wrote: post #353
systemvoltage wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Firearms, explosives and dangerous materials > Guns, gunpowders, ammunitions, weapons, fireworks and other explosives. Peptides, research chemicals, and other toxic, flammable and radioactive materials Why does the payment processor get to dictate whether I can run a defense ordnance company or run a scientific chemical supplies store? Some of this stuff needs to be challenged in the court or regulated so that paym…

> Why does the fucking payment processor get to dictate whether I can run a defense ordnance company or run a scientific chemical supplies store? Because they have the legal right to do so? They could ban companies run by redheads, if they like. As long as they're not discriminating based on very specific sets of criteria established by law, they get to choose who they do business with. The government requiring priva…

They are common carriers. The elephant in the room is the Visa/Mastercard duopoly.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#583

Post by sli »

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.

"Let the fires burn."

Onboarding new customers looks better and gets more funding than maintaining quality for existing customers, so they just don't care.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#584

Post by Cederfjard »

matiasfernandez wrote: post #576

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…

> They need to nuke all their "X Verification APIs" and just manually check each and every account.

Wouldn't they then just be another one of the more old school merchant service providers, who still exist for you to use if you're open to paying for being underwritten up front? The point of Stripe et al is to be cheap, quick and easy in comparison (for the happy path, anyway) through more automation, with the drawback of these types of failure modes.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#585

Post by honeybadgerdc »

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…

Shopify has treated me in this exact same way. No customer service.. no response.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#586

Post by majormajor »

bigiain wrote: post #554
yamtaddle wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> especially if you don't refund it. That's the trick. Let Stripe put the money into your bank account and let them think its a real sale (not a production test), then refund the money out of the bank account back to the person who's card was used instead of refunding or reversing the charge. Stripe don't need to know about that. (You also owe yourself "due diligence" in knowing that you _can_ refund or reverse charg…

This is what my team always did for QA when I worked in a space using payment processors.

No need to roll back the transactions directly and risk flagging anything.

Plus, it's often useful having a real, live, paid and in good standing account and/or purchase in the system for further testing steps! (More true in the subscription space than the one-time purchase space... but even there... it's probably worth testing your refund flow end to end periodically eventually, once you have a healthy set of traffic under your belt to avoid standing out.)

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#587

Post by max51 »

vlod wrote: post #401
max51 wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It’s a very unethical practice because it ends up hitting businesses at the worst possible time, when the termination or suspension causes a huge financial hit. You forgot the part where Paypal get to keep your money when they close your account. And it's not like they only keep it temporarily in case of lawsuits/chargebacks, they just keep it forever. I still can't believe that crap is legal.

Are you saying you should empty your account constantly (nightly?) in case paypal gets shut down your account, for unknown and un-communicated reasons?

You know what's better than learning from your own mistake? learning form other people's mistake.

If you login during a vacation overseas and get your account locked, they keep everything in it. Doesn't matter if you never did any transactions yet and all that money is yours from the bank account you linked. If you get banned, you lose it. Getting your account and/or your money back is about the same level of difficulty as getting unbanned from a google account. It's not impossible, but be prepared to take them to court.

If you only use PayPal to purchase things online, the protection is great, but you don't want to be on the other end of that transaction.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#588

Post by __d »

edwinwee wrote: post #182
leobg wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who’s Edwin? Is that the username here? I’m having the same issue. Was hoping to resolve this using customer service rather than through social media. But I just can’t seem to talk to any real human at Stripe.

What issue are you seeing? Could you email me at edwin@stripe.com?

It'd be great if companies' support processes worked well, and there was no need to reach out to specific individuals on HN, etc, but ... those individuals, like Edwin, who end up being "the Stripe guy" on HN do such amazing value-add for their business.

It's incredible to me that despite the sheer size of these companies, and the enormous number of customers from all over the world, that there's a place you can go and get someone who will pay personal attention to your issue.

Kudos Edwin.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#589

Post by HereIGoAgain »

Three things become clear once again. We need laws making it illegal to fail to provide a detailed reason for serious actions like this. We also need a complete reworking of the system as it is.. and likely a new official means for payment transaction services in general. Finally, and particularly in the context of digital money, we need laws ensuring bank/CC/PP neutrality. Just like water, gas and power. Financial services are just as fundamental and vital. If we can underwrite, back up, protect and bail them out, then they shouldn't be able to pick and choose or play favorites.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#590

Post by noisy_boy »

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…

Maybe the abstraction can be a selling point for your customers. They can sign-up for the recurring Stripe subscription but it comes with the risk of suspension. If they are ok with it, atleast they can't claim "I didn't know this" if/when it happens (this risk can be included in the contract to deal with executives leaving/"amnesia"). Or they can also have redundancy, which of course costs extra but can be thought of as an insurance and the abstraction does the rest.
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