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Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

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Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#691

Post by smsm42 »

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.

And that day was less than 100 years ago. "Money laundering" as a concept was invented during the Prohibition (as were a lot of other private rights violations) in order to not let alcohol sellers - which the government was not able to prosecute directly - to use their money. But most of the current US AML regulations are based on the Bank Secrecy Act from 1970.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#692

Post by pas »

soared wrote: post #601
pas wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a shadow government but it also makes sense.

It’s not a shadow government if the laws and policy are public. You can read all of the laws.

there's no FOIA for banking processes that affect you. consumer finance protection regulations are also a complete joke (oh no, banks have to file some more reports, oh the horror).

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#693

Post by mgkimsal »

mtmail wrote: post #286
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.

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

Others replied already, but I'll chime in too.

There's "testing"

* manual during development

* automated testing

And there's "testing"

* smoke checking processes in production

In most cases, the "test in production" is more of a "validation" that end to end experience works. And there probably shouldn't really be much of a way to distinguish between a "test" in production and a "validation" of the purchase process.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#694

Post by wpietri »

from wrote: post #674
wpietri wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you believe that private companies shouldn't have freedom of association? Or put differently, why should the government be able to force Stripe to do business with people who Stripe thinks would not be good for their business?

In a world of free association Stripe would probably be more willing to do business with "high risk" companies because they could charge them substantially higher fees. The government directly and indirectly tries to discourage business with these kinds of companies which is why companies like porn websites, fireworks wholesalers and check cashers have a hard time getting bank accounts these days.

Sorry, who do you believe is preventing Stripe from charging higher fees to riskier accounts? Please be specific.

Also, what's your evidence that some payment processors don't handle porn because of government pressure, rather than just natural market forces? I had a friend who did tech for a porn company, and from what he says, even a well-run porn company has much higher rates of chargebacks (e.g., next-day regrets and "no honey I don't know what that charge is") and fraud (stolen cards, fraudulent affiliate program participants).

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#695

Post by matiasfernandez »

Cederfjard wrote: post #584
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 drawbac…

We've done business with many "old school" merchant service providers and none have had us pay anything upfront. The only difference is that Stripe has a better API. Stripe's onboarding is not faster or cheaper than the other merchants by "automating". In fact, time-to-first-payout is much slower, less reliable, and the fees are much more expensive than any of our other providers.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#696

Post by matiasfernandez »

jkira wrote: post #612
matiasfernandez wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What payment processor did you switch to?

Our main bulk of transactions get processed with 4 different local payment providers (Accepta, Bank Tech, Dynamics Payments, and Evertec), one of which integrates with Authorize.net, which in turn integrates with Shopify as a custom gateway. For all of them, we were able to negotiate really good fees that are half of what we currently pay with Stripe.

My recommendation is to look into your local providers and see if any can integrate with payment APIs like Authorize.net. These providers really want your business and care enough to at least not let you go bankrupt. The bar is low!

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#697

Post by efreak »

eftychis wrote: post #613
ux-app wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Are you saying you should empty your account constantly This doesn't really help. When you link your bank account with PayPal the link is 2 way. I.e. PayPal can, without any input from you, transfer money out of your account. They can even do that if the account is empty. Your bank will almost certainly allow an overdraft on your account and you're still liable for the amount + overdraft fees. I had some issues with…

You can upon sign up of any bank account not allow overdraft. In fact it is an opt-in feature, that depends on your bank they communicate properly with you. I have for instance ensured there is no overdraft added in our business accounts. Or perhaps I am missing something here? But yes, please remove overdraft from your accounts. I have no input to offer on paypal at this time. P.S. Are you in the U.S.? I am just rea…

Not quite the same situation here, but overdrafting is a rather nasty feature in my experience. As a student I used a debit card to simplify my banking do I wouldn't have to think about how much money is in my account (if I'm unsure, simply send a text to get my balance or transfer); if I didn't have enough money in my account to buy a $10 lunch, then I wanted my transaction to fail, for budgeting reasons. This didn't work for two reasons:

1. Overdrafting. My bank would not allow me to turn off overdrafting on my checking account; any money in my savings account would be used to cover an underfunded purchase from my debit card, causing a $25 fee and there was nothing I could do about this, short of closing my savings account or reducing the amount of money in it. Since free checking was dependent on a linked savings account with $500 minimum balance, this wasn't an option. The overdraft/fee could cause the savings account balance to go below the minimum, and if I didn't notice I'd get a $25 fee for my savings account as well.

2. The school would constantly charge my debit card as a credit card, and the transaction wouldn't appear for up to two days. Doesn't really help me keep track of my balance when transactions don't show up. Cashiers at the student store could usually process the card properly, but every time I bought something to eat at the cafeteria it would process as credit, regardless of what I told them.

Today, I think bank policies have changed (though I switched banks before this) and I believe you can disable overdrafting on most large banks (WF and BofA, anyways)

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#698

Post by hattmall »

arjvik wrote: post #246
hattmall wrote: post #177

I wish there were better advise but after years of e-commerce experience all anyone will ever tell you is don't use Stripe. Don't use Square,don't use PayPal. Don't use any of the faceless companies for anything remotely critical and for anything that is critical have two backups. Basically that goes for things like hosting, payment processor or anything else your business depends on.

So what do you use instead?

A bank! All the banks offer merchant accounts and will have gateways they are setup with. Authorize.net is the big gateway if you want to do heavier coding and integration with existing solutions but there are hundreds of thousands of options. Regional banks usually offer the best rates. But this is if you are a "real" business. E-proccessors like Stripe, Square, PayPal etc are going after the very low hanging fruit of what are essentially consumers more so than businesses.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#699

Post by cx42net »

canadiantim wrote: post #673
cx42net wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what happens if getlago.com bans you? Haven't you just moved the single-point-of-failure at a different place?

It's open source, so I can just set up my own instance. I just have to be careful to make sure that process is as easy as possible. You never know what provider may ban you so yeah that's definitely a concern, but that's why I build on only open source.

Oh wow, I thought it was a paid service! That is good! Thank you for the clarification !

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#700

Post by e-clinton »

Psychlist wrote: post #591
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.

And this is exactly what I told a friend of my to do when he installed a public car charger. Before he told anyone it was live, charge his car using his normal customer account. Turned out he couldn't create one because his phone was already in as a supplier. After some eye-rolling he agreed to buy a burner phone, add a prepay SIM, and whaddayano the bloody charger did not work. Two months later it works, for most pe…

There are countless of virtual phone apps which allows calling and SMS for a few bucks a month. That’s what I’m doing to create “test” accounts on our stripe prod environment for something I’m building.
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