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Stripe Is the New PayPal

news.ycombinator.com

171–180 of 329 posts

Re: Stripe Is the New PayPal

#171
post #115

Stripe CEO here. I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm taking a look at what happened here. OP (disappointeddev), if you could drop me an email, that'd be great: patrick@stripe.com.

+5 for the CEO of the company responding in under 45 minutes to a post from a disgruntled customer.

Re: Stripe Is the New PayPal

#173
post #158
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, except not every Stripe customer knows that the real place to get support is (apparently) Hacker News, rather than Stripe support. The fact that the official channels are non responsive but a post on HN gets an immediate response could be construed as a red flag: the company cares more about avoiding bad PR than about having good customer service.

Well, the "support" here is just much more visible than everything else that we do. We provide support over as many channels as possible: we employ full-time folks in #stripe on IRC, we monitor Twitter, we send thousands of emails every day, we're rolling out phone support, we chat with customers on IM -- and, yes, we reply on HN. Obviously nobody should have to post here, but we'll certainly respond if they do. Frau…

Has anyone defrauded you with a bitcoin payment yet? I assume volume is low, but out of that volume has there been any reports of fraud?

Re: Stripe Is the New PayPal

#174
Fraud is an incredibly difficult problem for payment processors, for both technical and business reasons. It's well worth studying if you're into this sort of thing.

Fraud is a sensitivity/specificity problem. For sensitivity, Stripe wants to detect as many actual fraud cases as possible, because undetected fraud is expensive. For specificity, they want as few false positives as possible, because false positives mean angry customers who feel mistreated.

Generally, there's a sensitivity/specificity tradeoff, and priorities need to be set (which is worse - letting criminals get away, or frustrating honest customers?). But at such a scale, and with so many creative minds working on new mechanisms for fraud, it's impossible to achieve perfect numbers on either side.

Re: Stripe Is the New PayPal

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their engineering support is incredible, and their API is well-documented and so easy to integrate. It is hard to believe that they can't spend a little more time focusing on customer support, especially as they continue to add new features and countries the problem is only going to increase. At least adding a public-facing ticketing system would pull some pressure off. I don't necessarily mind waiting for support, i…

If I were doing a high number of transactions and relying on Stripe to provide all my CC processing, I would gladly pay an extra $25-50 a month to have priority support in instances where there may be fraud. Shoot, even at a couple hundred in transactions each month I would gladly pay for priority support. I would rather have a $25 expense each month than risk business loss due to real or suspected fraud. Shoot at so…

If you're putting a lot of volume though Stripe, all those things are possible.

Notwithstanding Stripe's SaaS-y "all pricing and deals are public" branding, they definitely have a BD team who can set you up with more direct contacts for certain types of questions, different rates than are publicly posted, and APIs that aren't public (to name a few things).

Re: Stripe Is the New PayPal

#176
Stripe is a Ycombinator company. I got downvoted when I told the CEO of Stripe my troubles with Stripe, he said to email but then never responded creating the public perception that they care, when they don't.

You will just find downvoting brigades of people on HN when it comes to any YC backed company. Which is probably why this will be my last post on HN. You can't get anything truthful on here if YC has backed them.

Re: Stripe Is the New PayPal

#177
post #89

Can we please all take a look at disapointeddev's account and use just a little bit of salt here? Just one grain maybe? His account was obviously activated for the purpose of submitting this post and he has provided NO follow up comments at this time. His post has been up for an hour. I'm not saying anything about the validity of his claim, but we obviously need more information. Please check back and wait for him to…

As I said, I will be writing a more lengthy blog post about this. The only reason I posted this on HN is because I want Stripe to give me attention and solve the problem. I love Stripe's API which is why I want them to solve the issue. Also, I made a new account for my privacy.

Thanks for replying. I'd like it if you could link to the blog after you've finished writing it, but if you don't want to for privacy purposes I get that.

I just see people running off in a million directions in the comments on HN and it's nice to wait and let things play out a little before we jump on any bandwagons, this is an event that requires a follow up to be a complete story. So please also follow up with your experience with Stripe after coming to this forum (through link to your blog or in the comments or an edit). I'm sure we'd all like to get the complete story.

Re: Stripe Is the New PayPal

#178
post #115

Stripe CEO here. I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm taking a look at what happened here. OP (disappointeddev), if you could drop me an email, that'd be great: patrick@stripe.com.

Just like when you told me to email you and then never responded. What a joke.

Re: Stripe Is the New PayPal

#179
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other payment processors that do not use a 'freemium' model charge less for their processing fees (and varying rates across cards). The reason it seems freemium for Stripe and other competitors is that they charge higher processing fees for the convenience than other traditional processors do.

It's a nice spread too. They take a 2.9% fee for charging a debit/check card, but pay Visa as little as 0.05% + $0.21.

Nice? 2.9% sounds horrible. Why do we pay that much again?

Re: Stripe Is the New PayPal

#180
post #115

Stripe CEO here. I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm taking a look at what happened here. OP (disappointeddev), if you could drop me an email, that'd be great: patrick@stripe.com.

Despite this being a public forum of great scale, and a certain degree of PR involved etc. etc., I think its great that you took the time to respond yourself (or even saw the post in the first place). I was considering a few services for transitioning a home grown billing system (old and tired), and this helped me decide to go with Stripe.
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