This is just a general rant, but I wish it could be more than that.
A little over a week ago, my startup saw our first and sudden uptick in user activity. After a few hard months of work building our platform, we were relieved to see customer feedback and turn our first profit. It was through a marketing campaign that had finally reached its target market after endless tuning and optimization. Prior to this point, we're majorly negative net on product R&D. It was a major win.
All payments were processed on our website through Stripe. I know. Major mistake to rely on one business to keep ours afloat. But our product neither violated Stripe policy nor did our account have any prior issues, so I just kept my fingers crossed and hoped for the best. Which all in all is not a great customer experience.
We fulfilled nearly all of our freshly incoming orders within 3 days of the transactions.
One day before our biggest payout hits, I'm awoken at 2:15 in the morning to an email from Stripe that sends me into sheer panic. Due to our company making 'unauthorized' charges on our user's cards, our account is both closed and Stripe is forcing a charge reversal for all transactions on our account.
We do not do this. Customers finalize checkout on a Stripe payment page, where they are shown amount, enter card details, and click a big fat button that says "Pay now". I cannot envision any alternate universe where this kind of act is unauthorized.
Anyways, I'm laying in bed at 2AM utterly crushed by the email, sure, but I then made the grave mistake of looking at my Stripe dashboard. We're in the red. We have a negative Stripe balance just one day before the biggest payout our startup has ever seen. Not only do we owe Stripe money, we're on the hook for COGS for every single transaction on our account.
Support wise, we're at a dead end. There is no phone number. If you email the company, you'll reach only robots pretending to be humans. Stripe has not replied to an email in 4 days. I get the exact same line from each contact attempt. "This decision is final and in order to protect our processes, we are unable to provide further details regarding the reason for your account's closure."
We're utterly fucked. I'm behind on bills solely from Stripe's negligence in account review. I never expect to hear from them again despite my consistent attempts, and I highly doubt a human being at Stripe has ever as much as looked at my account or read my emails in their entirety.
One question I have for the community: why is payment processing the most uptight industry on this planet? I cannot imagine one other business model that would require a company to treat their customers with such disrespect. There is zero compassion. There is zero regard for humanity. Why? All we're doing here is processing an online payment.