Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stripe is wrongly suspending accounts

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 146 posts

Re: Stripe is wrongly suspending accounts

#61

Post by danpalmer »

n0tth3dro1ds wrote: post #10

At this point, I don’t know how any founder on HN doesn’t make their business… 1) Multi-cloud and… 2) Multi-payment processor These stories are horrifying. These cloud and payment processors simply do not care. They print money and provide no human support. Any venture that I make in the future will be cloud-agnostic containers on several cloud providers with at least two payment processors handling an even share of…

Or rather, get a contract with your cloud provider and payment processor that clearly lays out the terms under which they will and won't suspend you.

My previous company had a business contract with GCP and so wouldn't be cut off for, for example, a dodgy employee account tied to the business in some way.

It's amazing how many people put their email and credit card in a form, pay sticker price for a service, and have their entire business depend on it. The terms of those contracts necessarily have to protect the service from all sorts of malicious users who just click sign-up. Talk to a person, get a contract, and the whole conversation changes (and yes GCP has account managers for this).

Re: Stripe is wrongly suspending accounts

#63

Post by ComputerGuru »

n0tth3dro1ds wrote: post #10

At this point, I don’t know how any founder on HN doesn’t make their business… 1) Multi-cloud and… 2) Multi-payment processor These stories are horrifying. These cloud and payment processors simply do not care. They print money and provide no human support. Any venture that I make in the future will be cloud-agnostic containers on several cloud providers with at least two payment processors handling an even share of…

My most important overhaul for our business was abstracting over payments and ensuring we weren’t dependent on any one processor for online checkouts. It doesn’t matter who you are with or how flexible they are, sooner or later, for logistical, account, network, or other issues, if you have only one payment provider it is going to be unavailable and you’re going to be losing money.

If you’re on the .NET stack, our abstraction [0] is over PayPal, PayPal credit card, Stripe, ChargeBee, CoinBase, Amazon Payments, and other providers that have since been replaced with no-op exceptions because the payment processors have gone under.

[0]: https://www.nuget.org/packages/NeoSmart.Payments/

Re: Stripe is wrongly suspending accounts

#64

Post by saurik »

websap wrote: post #21
web3isgoing wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if the application and its users demand it. Reversibility is possible in peer-to-peer and decentralized payment systems. But not every app needs reversibility and the centralized intermediaries that come with that.

What use case of money transfer doesn’t require reversibility for fraud prevention? I love credit cards because I can dispute transactions.

Craigslist explicitly tells people selling on it to avoid accepting online payments (like, PayPal) and only work with cash because the online payments are reversible and sellers constantly get scammed. You have to remember that transactions involve two parties, and it isn't somehow always the case that only the ones on one side matter.

The power balance simply isn't always "seller who is selling a large quantity of easily-replaceable items that might be a dud can easily amortize the cost of fraud across all of their payments by high margins"... sometimes it really is "seller who is selling a small quantity of expensive or precious items tends to get scammed by anonymous buyers who abuse chargebacks ".

Re: Stripe is wrongly suspending accounts

#65

Post by megous »

adrr wrote: post #54
n0tth3dro1ds wrote: post #10

At this point, I don’t know how any founder on HN doesn’t make their business… 1) Multi-cloud and… 2) Multi-payment processor These stories are horrifying. These cloud and payment processors simply do not care. They print money and provide no human support. Any venture that I make in the future will be cloud-agnostic containers on several cloud providers with at least two payment processors handling an even share of…

Or you could just get your own merchant account for payment processing and do all the diligence and requirements upfront. And you get to talk to someone and explain what you're doing to resolve issues upfront.

How exactly does that help? We had a customer who told the payment processor he's going to be selling X. They were told it's perfectly fine. After a month, payment processor told the customer they found they're selling X and can't sell X using their service.

Due diligence, lol. In fact, the world is just a huge mess, and you have to have backup plans for all the important things in your business, or not care for downtime.

Re: Stripe is wrongly suspending accounts

#66

Post by Xylakant »

dibt wrote: post #41
waboremo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would Gumroad prevent this? Hell Gumroad has an entire FAQ devoted to account suspensions so it's clearly an issue for them too.

An alternate processor while stripe figures out the mess - revenue keeps coming in. Gumroad has their own failures, but if ANY issue with payment processing is intolerable, don’t bother running a business.

In this case, it’s likely that they have set up recurring SEPA debit payments. Changing the payment provider won’t keep the revenue coming in - it would require every customer to sign up for debit again. And when stripe figures out the mess, you need to consolidate the two providers or you’ll end up debiting twice.

Re: Stripe is wrongly suspending accounts

#67

Post by Xylakant »

gommm wrote: post #58
smca_ wrote: post #30

Can you email me (smca@stripe.com) with more detail? I'll look into this. We don’t typically comment in detail on individual cases, but we do think it’s important for onlookers to know that we take every single case like this seriously. It looks like what happened here was an edge case involving SEPA payments that resulted in a dispute rate that’s far in excess of what’s generally permitted by financial partners. Whe…

That makes sense for cards but if most of the payments are SEPA transfers, then it doesn't make that much sense since there's no chargebacks for SEPA transfers. Maybe the issue is a fraud system designed for cards that's not well thought out for other forms of payments.

There’s no chargeback for SEPA transfers that are initiated by the customer, but the OP is using SEPA direct debit which is initiated by the vendor and has chargeback.

Re: Stripe is wrongly suspending accounts

#68

Post by yuppiepuppie »

n0tth3dro1ds wrote: post #10

At this point, I don’t know how any founder on HN doesn’t make their business… 1) Multi-cloud and… 2) Multi-payment processor These stories are horrifying. These cloud and payment processors simply do not care. They print money and provide no human support. Any venture that I make in the future will be cloud-agnostic containers on several cloud providers with at least two payment processors handling an even share of…

> Multi-payment processing

I work for a company the does exactly this [0]

It’s amazing to see companies who not only optimize their business logic. But also their payments and how that generates direct revenue. Being able to switch payment providers at the push of a button has really opened up opportunities for growth and derisked a critical part of their business.

[0]: https://primer.io

Re: Stripe is wrongly suspending accounts

#69

Post by nerder92 »

gommm wrote: post #58
smca_ wrote: post #30

Can you email me (smca@stripe.com) with more detail? I'll look into this. We don’t typically comment in detail on individual cases, but we do think it’s important for onlookers to know that we take every single case like this seriously. It looks like what happened here was an edge case involving SEPA payments that resulted in a dispute rate that’s far in excess of what’s generally permitted by financial partners. Whe…

That makes sense for cards but if most of the payments are SEPA transfers, then it doesn't make that much sense since there's no chargebacks for SEPA transfers. Maybe the issue is a fraud system designed for cards that's not well thought out for other forms of payments.

This is exactly my point, SEPA DD is by design high dispute because the customer can dispute a payment on a no-question-asked basis over a span of 8 weeks.

This can also happen due to insufficient funds, or as it happens if the mandate you (Stripe) send them is wrong. We previously have an issue with this exact same account where the reason for the disputes was an incorrect mandate and we were refunded for those.

Re: Stripe is wrongly suspending accounts

#70

Post by pifm_guy »

n0tth3dro1ds wrote: post #10

At this point, I don’t know how any founder on HN doesn’t make their business… 1) Multi-cloud and… 2) Multi-payment processor These stories are horrifying. These cloud and payment processors simply do not care. They print money and provide no human support. Any venture that I make in the future will be cloud-agnostic containers on several cloud providers with at least two payment processors handling an even share of…

Recurring payments have massive lock-in - typically there is no way to switch payment providers without requiring the user re-enter their payment details.

You'll typically lose ~half the user's each time you do that...

Post reply on HN