>fine of $425,000
Legally speaking, can Stripe keep that money? Flurly will be broke and cannot payout their customers. Aren't those customers as entitled to their money as is Stripe or the card networks?
Stripe can completely ruin your 6-figure business in one minute
31–40 of 63 posts
Re: Stripe can completely ruin your 6-figure business in one minute
#32Is it legal for a private company to impose a financial penalty on you without even explaining the reason?
Not in the UK; contractual penalty clauses are illegal. You can only be held liable for damages caused by a breach of contract.
I'm sure the card networks can do what they want and it'd be months before a court could catch up though.
Re: Stripe can completely ruin your 6-figure business in one minute
#33That's not the first time Stripe is pointed fingers at, and most probably rightly so, but, for someone like me, totally unaware of what Flurly is, damn their service description seems shady, at best.
"Sell any digital product in under a minute and keep 99% of what you make after payment processing fees. No monthly fees either."
How is that shady?
Re: Stripe can completely ruin your 6-figure business in one minute
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
The business even admits they took on a ton of liability by not using Stripe Connect. They switched to Connect but grandfathered old accounts. If you’re taking liability for what your customers do, you can end up getting fines like this. Stripe doesn’t want this. It’s not like they get the money from the fine, if anything they’re on the hook for it. So, why again is this a scam?
As you claim, if they are a payment processor, then they shouldn't need another payment processor to handle money for them... their prospective customers could just use stripe directly.
I misunderstood your post, I thought you were blaming stripe.
I agree with you though there is sometimes value in payment gateway aggregators. Having one for managing multiple processors, including payment methods stripe doesn’t support.
Stripe itself is a payment processing aggregator: you could just implement the direct integrations from the banks/card networks.
But yes fintech is built on middlemen building on top of middlemen. Sadly it’s too expensive to build from the lowest layer, so businesses tend to start from the highest one and only rebuild a layer below if they’re successful and have money.
It’s only fixable with more open source fintech layers imo.
Re: Stripe can completely ruin your 6-figure business in one minute
#35From a previous discussion Stripe's response seems to be reasonable. They have a solution to avoid this kind of situation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34747702
It seems that Flurry's well intentioned call (not asking legacy customers to move immediately to the right payment mechanism) backfired.
Re: Stripe can completely ruin your 6-figure business in one minute
#36Is it legal for a private company to impose a financial penalty on you without even explaining the reason?
Not in the UK; contractual penalty clauses are illegal. You can only be held liable for damages caused by a breach of contract. I'm sure the card networks can do what they want and it'd be months before a court could catch up though.
That's interesting, so you couldn't set up a contract that said "I deliver 10 units of X every 10 days, and you pay me 100 units of money. If I fail to deliver the units, I pay you 50 units of money"?
Re: Stripe can completely ruin your 6-figure business in one minute
#37Your 6-figure business tend to get ruined if you sell shady stuff and end up blacklisted by card networks, Stripe or not. You have someone else to blame on social media when you use Stripe, though.
Re: Stripe can completely ruin your 6-figure business in one minute
#38If you've followed HN for any time, you know to avoid stripe.
Re: Stripe can completely ruin your 6-figure business in one minute
#39That's not the first time Stripe is pointed fingers at, and most probably rightly so, but, for someone like me, totally unaware of what Flurly is, damn their service description seems shady, at best.
"Sell any digital product in under a minute and keep 99% of what you make after payment processing fees. No monthly fees either." How is that shady?
Not verifying the legitimacy of the merchant making the transaction. Banking and payments are very tightly regulated and there are AML-KYC laws (anti-money-laundering/know-your-customer) that need to be complied with.
Re: Stripe can completely ruin your 6-figure business in one minute
#40That's not the first time Stripe is pointed fingers at, and most probably rightly so, but, for someone like me, totally unaware of what Flurly is, damn their service description seems shady, at best.
"Sell any digital product in under a minute and keep 99% of what you make after payment processing fees. No monthly fees either." How is that shady?
Two reasons:
1/ sounds very much like "Make $10k/month from the comfort of your couch. No strings attached"
2/ "sell any digital product" sounds like "we're not looking". " in under a minute" is an exaggeration most probably. "99%" is clearly psychological bait. "After processing fees" is a red flag because it's the one place in two description that is not metered.
It's the accumulation of small things that draw a big red flag, to me.