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Flurly has been shut down by Stripe

flurly.com

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Re: Flurly has been shut down by Stripe

#41

Post by edwinarbus »

anigbrowl wrote: post #4

It seems a little unfair to blame Stripe here. Per their communication, the site has been assessed as selling illegal merchandise and is subject to a $425k fine by the payment card issuers, despite Stripe's efforts to dispute the issue on behalf of their client. It's not clear to me whether this is the first that Flurly has heard about the issue or represents the last stage of an ongoing story, which Flurly's users w…

(Edwin from Stripe here.) This is a really unfortunate situation. I can't talk specifics since it's a regulatory/legal matter and the decision wasn't up to us. But as others have pointed out, Stripe Connect should be used if you're building a marketplace. This gives the marketplace owner, Stripe, and the card networks some visibility into what's being exchanged—and so the marketplace owner can put proper safeguards in place to keep the marketplace safe, for both sellers and their customers. I'm saddened by what happened and I hope this does not deter JR from building future products.

Re: Flurly has been shut down by Stripe

#42

Post by charlieyu1 »

reaperducer wrote: post #22
diazc wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What exactly do you think the alternative is? crypto? I was able to send the USDC stablecoin to a business accepting crypto with Coinbase Commerce just fine and transaction was very quick. I can see that even Stripe is getting involved in crypto as well.

So your solution for not using a third-party is to use a different third party?

People blame crypto for many things but at least crypto is not monopolized and you don't need the approval of a third party to use crypto to pay.

Re: Flurly has been shut down by Stripe

#43

Post by eclipxe »

Flurly’s selling point was dramatically lower fees compared to Gumroad. Unfortunately the take rate isn’t sustainable to run a marketplace that does things like vet sellers - the products sold on Flurly all seemed like spam/scams -wasn’t surprising to see Stripe shut it down.

If I remember correctly Flurly did $500kish in sales over maybe 6months? Sounds great but the take was only 1%. That’s $5000usd over 6 months. Not a sustainable model.

Re: Flurly has been shut down by Stripe

#44

Post by dan1234 »

livinglist wrote: post #33
duskwuff wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly do you think the alternative is? If you want to accept payments online, you need to do so through a credit card processor. There is no "self-hosted" alternative.

No my point is not to rely on a single third party completely

If they’ve been add to MATCH (card provider blocklist) they won’t be getting service from any other third parties now.

Re: Flurly has been shut down by Stripe

#45

Post by MrDunham »

From the original Show HN[1] a commenter wrote:

""" As an intermediary in 2020, you're likely to see a lot of people target you in various ways because they don't like things that people are using your platform for. They may threaten you with lawsuits, complaints to law enforcement, boycotts, DDoS, trying to get your payment relationships cut off, trying to get your other platform providers to cut you off, etc. If your platform has a high profile or is used to sell something high-profile, journalists and politicians may publicly second-guess your content decisions (both things that you did remove and things that you didn't remove).

I don't want to alarm you about this, but it would be nice if you could figure out any content and moderation policies ahead of time, explain them clearly to prospective sellers, and then see if you can stick to them when other people disagree with them. """

Seems a bit prophetic - at least for the need for content moderation policies (and maybe not so much grandfathering)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25482168

Re: Flurly has been shut down by Stripe

#46

Post by goatsi »

triyambakam wrote: post #29
nickstinemates wrote: post #11

It is so weird to see multiple typos in form emails sent to Stripe customers. https://flurly.com/images/stripe-email-1.png Seriously, does anyone proof read this stuff?

Do you mean s/Stripe/stripe/g?

"some information abotu"

"in roder to know"

Re: Flurly has been shut down by Stripe

#48

Post by version_five »

ilaksh wrote: post #19

This makes me consider using cryptocurrency for payments on my SaaS. The one I am most familiar with is not popular (instant downvote on HN) so I won't mention it. But anyway with a cryptocurrency, at least I know that no one is going to "shut down my account" or some nonsense like that.

Dogecoin?

Re: Flurly has been shut down by Stripe

#49

Post by thallium205 »

Those clients weren’t “grandfathered”. You were processing payments for sketchy businesses that couldn’t possibly pass Stripe’s onboarding process through Connect under your merchant id. This payment aggregation is, of course, against card network rules so you got fined and placed on MATCH.

Re: Flurly has been shut down by Stripe

#50

Post by diazc »

jeremyjh wrote: post #31
diazc wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What exactly do you think the alternative is? crypto? I was able to send the USDC stablecoin to a business accepting crypto with Coinbase Commerce just fine and transaction was very quick. I can see that even Stripe is getting involved in crypto as well.

But what if they want customers to buy things?

They can buy things? Shopify, Woocommerce has integrations for this, this isn't really an issue.
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