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Stripe is wrongly suspending accounts

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Re: Stripe is wrongly suspending accounts

#81
post #65
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 down…

Because merchant account is a contract with you and the bank. You get an individual merchant account that If any card provider doesn't like you, they can ban you. Stripe, you're using their merchant account. If banks ban that merchant account, they ban all stripe customers. Key difference in risk for your payment processor. I have had banks ban my merchant account but my payment processor didn't care.

Re: Stripe is wrongly suspending accounts

#83
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any integrators that shim out multi payment processors? EDIT: Did I just leak a b dollar idea? Have fun :)

What's the actual "idea" here? I mean, the answer is obviously yes, depending on what you consider integrators.

A layer that makes it more palatable to switch between payment processors

Re: Stripe is wrongly suspending accounts

#84
post #55

Seems like the payment processing is monopolised by stripe - Are there any good alternatives to stripe?

Braintree

No way. Braintree was brain dead when i looked into them awhile ago. Despite the flaws of Stripe (and its downward trajectory in quality) it’s still better than Braintree.

Re: Stripe is wrongly suspending accounts

#85
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Startup idea: wrapper around payments providers.

And then the wrapper company gets massive and starts wrongfully suspending customers...

Re: Stripe is wrongly suspending accounts

#86

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…

This x 1000!

Do kids these days not realize you can negotiate anything and everything with your vendors/suppliers/partners?

Yes, most SaaS companies LOVE it when you sign up for one of their standard plans, using THEIR standard T&C's, and standard payments.

But, DID YOU KNOW, if something is critical to your business, you can negotiate directly with pretty much every business on the face of the planet, and if your spend is large enough, or you're willing to pay, you can negotiate anything????

It's nuts, I know :)))))

Re: Stripe is wrongly suspending accounts

#88
post #7

Monthly HN Stripe customer support thread

Maybe this is a good place to ask the question: 1. Why is stripe a seemingly preferred payment processor for HN crowd? 2. Is there no ( edit: real ) competition or is the competition similarly bad ( or somehow worse )? edit: Instead of replying individually, I decided to edit this section. Thank you everyone for the background(s). It does answer a lot of the questions I had. I perused their site and I can absolutely…

It's following the trend of nearly every startup ever made.

* Newcomer trying to gain traction. They'll do just about anything to make and keep customers in the name of top-line growth. This includes expensive labor and human costs.

* Grow into a successful business. Start feeling the pains of "infinite growth".

* Realizing revenue can't grow indefinitely, they start cutting costs and see how long they can ride the coat-tails of success.

* The small/cheap accounts start gaining wind that customer support sucks, so they start looking for something else. The big accounts are likely still happy since they're large enough to justify a handler who will make them happy.

* A new startup lurks in the background, likely to follow the same process.

It really just comes down to whether or not the incumbent realizes it's only a matter of time before the major accounts start leaving too.

Re: Stripe is wrongly suspending accounts

#89

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…

Just hope that your startup will make enough to pay for egress.

Re: Stripe is wrongly suspending accounts

#90

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…

Way more than double the work to integrate two, since you need to define a generic API and product workflow on top of similar-but-different underlying APIs.

In particular payments are a nightmare to generalize. Either they assume directly interacting with the user (do you have your customer enter their data twice?) or you have to collect the info and ensure you capture the superset of fields required (particularly onerous for international) and then have a process for handling KYC/fraud cases on each. Payment routing becomes more complex, each rail has its own timing you need to learn, exception cases, support protocols, and so on.

For cloud infra if you pick your APIs carefully you can make it fairly easy to lift-n-shift (eg using k8s and running your own Kafka) but it’s not going to be trivial if you use hosted services such as RDS, SQS, etc.

IMO you are WAY more likely to die from running out of runway than because of problems with your payment rail. These are bad when they come up, but remember you are seeing the worst cases highlighted here, and not the 99.9(…)% of customers that don’t have business-impacting issues. TANSTAAFL etc.

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