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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

#141

Post by jacquesm »

Closi wrote: post #101
lucas_adlp wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. This is double counting, and not how you calculate net loss. You can't take both a negative and a positive cash outflow, then make them both positive and add them together.

One reason Stripe may stop doing business with a party is if they do not believe that party is going to be around long enough to honor their warranty risks because Stripe is the merchant of record on these transactions. The inability of the OP to get basic bookkeeping terminology right would be an excellent reason to cease doing business with them, both as an IPSP as well as a potential customer.

Companies magically going out of business after getting their money is one of the reasons these hold backs exist in the first place.

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

#142

Post by codeDruid »

stripestink wrote: post #129

[flagged]

Now I'm not familiar with Stripe or its founders. But perhaps Patrick has a colostomy bag[1]? Flatulence can get loud, uncontrollable and smell worse that regular.

1. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/22100-colos...

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

#143

Post by iLoveOncall »

mamidon wrote: post #44

This is the Nth horror story I've seen about stripe. It's the new Google. Good docs and a sane technical API make my life as a dev easier. But I'd rather use a payments vendor that I can trust not to deep 6 my company a year later. Any recommendations? Ideally they still have good docs and a sane API.

This is heavy confirmation bias.

You look at the 2-3 bad stories posted on HN every month but ignore the hundreds of thousands of companies using Stripe that don't have any issue.

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

#144

Post by lucas_adlp »

caitb wrote: post #130
4ggr0 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice that you're looking into it, but it always irks me a bit when seeing that companies only really react when people complain online about it (and the complaint receives traction). I had a request for my buildings management which they declined for over a year, stating that they wouldn't do it and I should solve it myself. After a year I wrote them a 3 star review on Google stating "Good people and no big issues, e…

We were in touch with OP over email before this post was made. We know that confirming we review cases posted here provides an incentive for bad actors to post. We wish that weren’t the case–but we do pay attention to both internal case reviews and to any public complaints where users are having a bad day (or, in some cases, profess to be having a bad day).

The only people that were in touch with me were support agents that were repeating what was said in the automated notification about payments being issued to customers after.

To me it looks like it took this post, a reddit post and Twitter mentions to get someone above the "normal" support to look into the matter, and put the automated refunds on pause while you investigate the case for a third time.

Nothing personal against you, but when almost 150k is held from us, and then decided by what seems to be a robot to refund all of these payments within 5 business days (although we've given you tracking numbers on the very first manual reviews where issuing refunds weren't even a topic) I hope it's quite clear that we're not professing to have a bad day, but rather that were acting in urgency to get fairly treated.

I'm not one to post on social media / publicly about my business generally, but when this is the only way to get your attention and I have roughly €250k euros at stake, what else should I do?

Hopefully we can resolve this (in a way where neither of us loses any money), without me having to take legal action against Stripe.

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

#145

Post by omeid2 »

jacquesm wrote: post #123
omeid2 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Stripe, or any payment processor was "paid" you would have to invoice them for tax purposes not the end user; and they will have to invoice and the end user and deal with Value Added and other taxes.

You should google the term 'merchant of record'. In this case Stripe is the merchant of record. If you bring your own merchant account then you are the merchant of record. In the first case it is Stripe that gets paid, in the second case it is you that gets paid. Either way, in this case the transactions will be reversed so it looks like soon nobody will have been paid. Stripe reduces your liability by acting as the…

And Stripe isn't a Merchant of Record. They even have a specific product to overcome this, Stripe Tax.

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

#147

Post by mamidon »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #143
mamidon wrote: post #44

This is the Nth horror story I've seen about stripe. It's the new Google. Good docs and a sane technical API make my life as a dev easier. But I'd rather use a payments vendor that I can trust not to deep 6 my company a year later. Any recommendations? Ideally they still have good docs and a sane API.

This is heavy confirmation bias. You look at the 2-3 bad stories posted on HN every month but ignore the hundreds of thousands of companies using Stripe that don't have any issue.

The issue isn't that stripe occasionally messes up. It's that apparently you can't get a human on the phone empowered to fix things.

Having your company destroyed because an automated system flagged it is an unacceptable risk.

With AWS, I can pay for a support contact and be confident my company won't blow up.

Stripe? Google? Not so sure

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

#148

Post by jacquesm »

omeid2 wrote: post #145
jacquesm wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should google the term 'merchant of record'. In this case Stripe is the merchant of record. If you bring your own merchant account then you are the merchant of record. In the first case it is Stripe that gets paid, in the second case it is you that gets paid. Either way, in this case the transactions will be reversed so it looks like soon nobody will have been paid. Stripe reduces your liability by acting as the…

And Stripe isn't a Merchant of Record. They even have a specific product to overcome this, Stripe Tax.

According to all of the information the OP has given they are in this case. If you have evidence to the contrary I'm all open to it but it does not apply here unless you have information that contradicts the OP in a believable way.

Also: note that Stripe has all kinds of technical countermeasures in place to detect money laundering and other terms violations and it may well be that everything looks totally above board to an outsider whereas they have valid reasons to deny a party service.

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

#149

Post by yawnxyz »

mcgin wrote: post #6

Can we please do something about hacker news being used for customer support? It's getting tiresome to see these appearing on a regular basis

Posts like these remind us that things can and do go wrong when working with these large companies.

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

#150

Post by talolard »

smca wrote: post #128
bushbaba wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As with all enterprise software buying, a key criteria is can I get a human on the phone to resolve the issue quickly-ish. Microsoft and Amazon get this, with differing strategies. Google and Stripe seem to not get it. Sure it doesn’t scale for the long tail, but it’s a necessity for any large enterprise account. Heck call it “stripe premium support” and charge an additional fee.

(I work at Stripe) If you have a Stripe account, you can navigate to support.stripe.com/contact right now and speak to someone. Chat is near instantaneous, email takes a little longer, and if you request a call it takes three minutes. If you're a developer, we also staff a Discord channel for more technical questions. This is available 365 24/7 . We also offer premium support if you need a dedicated support team for…

I used this channel and it was so frustrating it might not as well have existed . While the stripe team is always nice and the tech support is great, when I had a much less sever case of “stripe wants to destroy my business” I could get no straight answer or help from the support team
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