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Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers

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Re: Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers

#71

Out of curiosity, can you be more specific about what you sell? Consumer electronics like vapes or consumer electronics like Alibaba hoverboards or consumer electronics like a quality, entry level set of computer speakers? Stripe seems to be pretty sensitive towards certain industries and I'd like to see if this holds true here.

I also want to know.

Re: Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers

#72
post #43
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What alternatives are there to Stripe that don't suck? I've personally had nightmare experiences with Paypal, and there is no way in hell I'll be using crypto

Standard merchant gateway that has a relationship with your business bank. Ensure you procure that relationship through your bank with someone you actually speak to, ideally face to face but atleast on the phone. You pay slightly more than Stripe and the APIs generally suck but you don't end up with these sorts of impossible situations.

Rates on standard merchant accounts are generally lower or significantly lower than Stripe if your processing a bit of volume ($10k+ a month).

Re: Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers

#73
offtopic question: Is there any arbiter-payment function exists in Stripe/Paypal?

It's the secret source of success of Alibaba's Alipay. Internet was full of scams in China, so the consumers aren't willing to pay to sellers directly, Alipay introduced this extra step, after payment, the fee is onhold, then the consumer receives the goods/services and checking with Alipay, the payment finally goes through. This allows the eCom owner and consumers to negotiate problems case-by-case and shop owners to gain credit over the time.

This arbiter-payment feature of Alipay is groundbreaking in the 00s.

Re: Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers

#75
post #62

I must be stupid... but how a refunding of 150k makes a loss of 250k? I would assume the shipped goods are less than 150k (gain margin). That plus shipping is the loss. Shipping, assuming 150, you sold about 1000 items, which at 5EUR typical shipping ist 5k. Worst case, even with interest and all that you want... who do you come to 250k? I do not want to defend Stripe (I hate all that kind of companies), but there ar…

We've sent out products to all the customers that have paid. Stripe is now "considering" refunding all these customers, while holding 150k of our generated revenue. Due to the products being bought and shipped, (and not even factoring in marketing costs) this easily equates to a total net loss of 250k for our business.

That's not how you count a loss. Your loss is the product you bought (not sold) and the time and effort spent on sending it, as well as possible marketing expense to get it sold. You don't recognize the revenue until the money is in the bank, especially not if you have a dispute with your payment service provider otherwise you are creating yet another problem for yourself, the taxman will want his due even though you did not receive the money. So stop recognizing this as revenue until you have been paid.

Re: Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers

#79
I've never used Stripe before so wanted to ask a clarification question.

Their docs [1] say that the payout schedule is 7-14 days after the payment. What prevents companies from taking out their money every week (or 2 weeks)?

For OP, is 250k euros weekly income? If so, it shouldn't bother them?

If not, then why didn't they take out their money before this happened?

[1] https://stripe.com/docs/payouts

Re: Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers

#80
Without an idea of what it is that you are selling it is impossible to say whether or not you or Stripe are in the right here. Given that Stripe is willing to refund your customers that indicates that they do not want to be party to these transactions, you can then of course ask your customers to send you payment through some other means.

If you've shipped the goods before you received the payment that was a risk that you took upon yourself. If Stripe kept your money and did not refund your customers I would say the situation would be much more grave but apparently that did not happen.

You write 'If the payments do end up being refunded, we will of course be taking legal action and contacting media outlets in efforts bring this story to the public eye, and to hold Stripe accountable for this' -> but that's the wrong order. You've already been warned that Stripe will refund the customers. If you don't want that the time to take legal action is now and the first thing to do is to put a pre-emptive hold on that action until a judge has spoken about whether or not the refund can go through. Allowing the refund to go through without taking legal action is - pardon my French - about as stupid a move as you could make at this point.

Go talk to your lawyer, pronto, and stop making things worse for yourself by letting the clock run out.

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