Don't Use Stripe

I used Stripe for about 2 years to run a fashion brand in the uk. In the case of my business, I never had an issue processing my small payments for dresses, ranging from a couple hundred dollars up to $1000. All of a sudden, we start getting attention we get payments of $3300 and more. We had around 50000$ dollars on stripe. Stripe flagged the account and is now holding the money from me for "at least 120 days"

It is one thing to say this is a red flag, fine... I hear you... no problem. a transaction multiple times the size... sure. I get it. However, A normal payment processor would then query you for documents authorizing the charge, bank statements, financial statements, some sort of procedure to remedy the issue. Stripe provides NO SUCH METHOD TO RESOLVE these issues.

There are reports of Stripe continuing to add "30 days" to the reserve hold past the initial 120 days, indefinitely. Stripe is taking advantage of a lack of regulation in this space to steal small merchant's large transactions. They see a big, outlier transaction and lick their chops, hiding behind KYC and "Fraud prevention" To hold your money indefinitely.

You cannot call Stripe. They do not have a phone number. Their support page on their website has Phone call and messaging grayed out. You can only email. If you email, you get robots. Even in the same email thread, a different "agent" (with a different name and everything) answers each time with not prior knowledge of your history. There are no ticket numbers to your support request; nothing tracking it. The robots respond with what is quite obviously a template response.

If you do a little bit of research about this topic, you immediately see this is a prevailing issue. Reports of Stripe taking up to $31,000 are all over the internet! Again, Stripe gives no manner to remedy this. There is NO ONE you can call. NO ONE you can talk to. More disconcerting, it seems that anyone who posts about this issue on reddit gets downvoted and teamed up against by established Reddit accounts, that I have to imagine are owned by Stripe. These account have some established reddit history on them, mainly talking about coding in PERL. It's a little sus.

In my case, I sent my EIN letter, Sales Tax Receipt, Articles of Org, Statement of Trade Name, Certificate of Good Standing, Bank Statements, Website links, Signed transaction receipts, and anything I could think of to Stripe to review. I just received robot-responses.

I challenge anyone here to connect me to a human being at Stripe that can tell me how to resolve the issue. It can't be done. This is a big problem and should be brought to the attention of small business owners, and regulators!

TL;DR: Stripe is a faceless enterprise with no humans you can talk to, no publicly listed phone number, and will allow your small account to operate just fine for a while. As soon as they see that you are growing (and thus your chances of leaving Stripe for a larger, more favorable processor) they will Freeze your account, disallow you to issue refunds, and hold your money indefinitely. You've been warned!!!

I mean, come on, you've all been through this already, how could you fall for a reissue of PayPal?

I assumed that support and transparency were selling points of Stripe. If not, why bother? Just go with a good old local bank.

Report this at escammer.com

You can find similar stories about literally all online payment processors, including Paypal, Stripe, & all the "legacy" ones too (like First Data). Is it possible this isn't some nefarious conspiracy to steal money, but rather a reality of dealing with payments online given the regulatory environment it operates in?

Also this is the biggest season for sales and tech companies in general are dealing with navigating an extremely volatile macro economic environment - companies are planning for doing more with less staff and Q4 is likely pushing the limits for the customer support of many companies.

It is frustrating having your money on hold and there is a meaningful business impact that can have, but if you have tens of thousands of dollars tied up in Stripe (or any other payment processor), may I suggest expanding your other credit facilities such as lines of credit and loans, to allow you to navigate these sorts of situations, especially during Q4.

Just curious, is there a real alternative that:

1. Has customer service

2. Doesn’t charge high fees

I feel like those two things are mutually exclusive, the high fees can be thought of as an insurance policy to ensure good cs. The lower fee options are like those fly by night insurance companies.

Everyone wants a fantastic experience without paying for it, turns out cs is very expensive, and even if stripe offered a paid support option, then we’d have people here complaining about being forced to pay to get their money back… no you took a discount service and now are being charged for premium.