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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

#641

Post by senttoschool »

edwinwee wrote: post #517
iio7 wrote: post #496

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!?

I can't proactively share specifics about a business, but in this case, they operate in a regulated space. The banks and card networks we work with require some extra checks due to the prevalance of scams in this space. A reviewer on our team flagged the business, and admittedly, we weren't very clear about what was required in order to continue working with us. After talking with OP today, we re-enabled the business…

>After talking with OP today, we re-enabled the business.

Why didn't your team respond to him earlier?

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#643

Post by kureikain »

OP: I have even scraier email where Stripe decide to ban my account and it happens twice.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21306225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26320429

In both case https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=edwinwee Edwinww is a huge help and Im highly recomend to reach out to him.

Without Edwinwee my SaaS might never see life.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#644

Post by Faint »

Let at least the long-term customers pay later, or let them use your product for free while you set up another payment processor. You may ask your customers, which payment options work for them, and use that as help to pick a more reliable alternative.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#645

Post by vishnugupta »

apeace wrote: post #294
mgkimsal wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Next time I build something with Stripe I'm going to test it in production before launching I'm genuinely curious why you wouldn't have done that anyway? I pretty much always do, precisely so I can experience a full end to end user experience.

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…

> reversing it

This isn't recommended. Also, presumably by end-to-end you meant post auth business flow too. Such as reconciliation, settlement, generating tax receipts, invoices etc.,

In general, all the data in production should be real, as much as possible.

If the amount is big (e.g., say jewellery story) then figure out a way to recoup/refund the money out of band in a way that leaves no trace in production system. E.g., reimburse it, put it under QA budget or some such.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#646

Post by sacrosancty »

max51 wrote: post #587
vlod wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 difficu…

I've had my Paypal account frozen because I was cheating by living in a different country, not just on holiday. I managed to recover it by giving them the documents they wanted to "prove" that I lived in the country my account was in. I think this included getting my bank to send statements to a family member's address and have them email me a copy. I know some people really do get locked out for good but that wasn't my experience.

Trying to get money from a real bank account (Lloyds in England) after moving out of the country was much harder though. It involved writing several letters and getting a policeman to stamp something, as well as multiple phone calls, including to several staff who gave me wrong advice. But still, they returned my money eventually.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#647

Post by HereIGoAgain »

HereIGoAgain wrote: post #589

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 s…

Additionally, almost forgot to add. We need the government to stop treating financial institutions like they are law enforcement. I can't think of any other field, product or service where private or even semi-private actors are expected to actively play a roll in fighting crime, with actual legal stakes if they fail or don't play along.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#648

Post by jstummbillig »

mardifoufs wrote: post #228
jstummbillig wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stuff like this is why I think a business should have a system that abstracts away the payment processor. Realistically, more humanly, payment processors and other big tech companies that are basically societies digital gum and infrastructure can simply not be tasked with making these calls. I also don't think they are very keen to do it but in the absence of timely regulation they must. There have to be more rigor…

But there are tons of rules and laws around payments already, and they are often the reason why providers are so trigger happy and conservative even if it means losing clients. Regulatory requirements (KYC, money laundering, sanctions) usually force them to make those calls, quickly and by design. It's very clear that most financial regulations are customer/client unfriendly, and inherently treat them with distrust.…

There is nothing intrinsic about financial regulations that needs to be customer unfriendly. Checks can work both ways and what happened at stripe could for example be avoided by a statue which requires a reasonable explanation and a clear path and timeline towards resolution for the customer, regardless of the company they work with.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#649

Post by cx42net »

pamonrails wrote: post #639
cx42net wrote: post #635

The discussion here is very interesting. Many mentions the idea to not put all your eggs in the same (Stripe) basket. I agree with it, but how? You can not just store the credit card of your user (or have to go through a heavy compliance), and using services like Killbill.io or GetLago.com is just moving the single point of failure to another place. How would you ensure that you are not 100% relying on a specific pay…

Kill Bill (note: I'm a co-founder) provides payment routing capabilities, so you can integrate with multiple providers (e.g. Stripe + Adyen) and shift payment traffic to go through one or the other dynamically. This is very common in large b2c companies. That being said, to your point, this still requires either a vendor neutral vault for the cards or to tokenize them in all of the vendors. Possible, but still hard t…

Yeah,that's what I think too : It seems hard (impossible) to register user's credit card at each payment provider (Stripe, Adyen, etc) and then start a subscription at some place (Stripe) and automatically switch in case of issues. There is high probability that in this scenario, Adyen will see the credit card refused because it never did a single payment for, say, 2 years, and suddenly starts a 300$ monthly subscription.

And I'm not even talking about 3D Secure!

As mentioned in the comments, a solution would be to migrate from Stripe to a merchant account with a bank where your service is vetted upfront.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#650

Post by collyw »

pessimizer wrote: post #297
collyw wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name a blog post that has stuck with you because you learned something useful. Could you search for it and find it easily? Now do the same for an HN comment.

I'm pretty confident I could find any HN post that I remember with the search box at the bottom, or by googling it with site:news.ycombinator.com. With, half of the blogs that I liked I can't remember the name of the blog, it's probably either been dropped from search engine indexes for being older than a year or two or pushed to the 10th page by better SEO, or the site has simply vanished.

OK, I have little doubt that many readers of HN could find something here, but I think that for the vast majority of people finding a blog post will be a lot easier than an HN post. Styling will be an obvious advantage, you will be able to take a very quick look at a blog post and be able to remember if it's what approximately you saw before or not. You will need to read at least partially through an HN post to gather if it is the wrong one and reject it.
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