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Stripe Atlas is nothing but a bad marriage

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Re: Stripe Atlas is nothing but a bad marriage

#11

Post by owenversteeg »

ajeet_dhaliwal wrote: post #7

I can sympathize because it was just one business unit that he had apparently recently acquired that was responsible for this and the rest of his businesses were ok. The biggest lessons are to be aware of what you are acquiring and the issues they are having, make sure it's very clear to customers how they can contact YOU to get a refund and finally, it's probably a good idea to have separate accounts for different b…

That sounds like the real lesson here: have separate accounts for separate sites.

I haven't used Stripe for years, so I'm not sure: is that totally kosher? And if you enter the same business/tax/ID details for two different accounts, will there be any problems?

It'd be great to hear from someone about Stripe about this, as I know a lot of Stripe people hang around HN.

Re: Stripe Atlas is nothing but a bad marriage

#12

Post by jtchang »

> The percentage of volume on your account that has been disputed (you are currently 44.82%)

Holy. ANY payment process will drop you after something like this. A botched purchase of another company doesn't relieve you of any of the obligations they had made.

Re: Stripe Atlas is nothing but a bad marriage

#13

Post by goatforce5 »

cavisne wrote: post #8
jasonlotito wrote: post #4

6.5% chargeback rate. This entire blog post reads like other posts of its type from people who don't understand credit card processing or how it all works. "Shortly after sending the above information we discovered that the specific charges flagged as fraudulent were not fraudulent charges. They were, in fact, due to chargebacks related to a recently acquired eCommerce store where fulfillment was lagging heavily duri…

Actually a 44% chargeback rate by volume! It only takes a little bit of reading between the lines to see the author bought a site that sold fraudulent gear, didn’t realise this for a bit and then shut it down. If stripe hadn’t frozen payouts they would be stuck holding the bag for 44 percent of the total charges in the account. The new account thing does sound beuracratic but I guess it restarts the KYC process.

I worked for a high-risk merchant, and a 44% chargeback rate is utterly insane. IIRC, internal alarms would go off and the processors would be breathing down our necks if the chargeback rate started to approach 2%.

Re: Stripe Atlas is nothing but a bad marriage

#14

Post by nthj »

owenversteeg wrote: post #11
ajeet_dhaliwal wrote: post #7

I can sympathize because it was just one business unit that he had apparently recently acquired that was responsible for this and the rest of his businesses were ok. The biggest lessons are to be aware of what you are acquiring and the issues they are having, make sure it's very clear to customers how they can contact YOU to get a refund and finally, it's probably a good idea to have separate accounts for different b…

That sounds like the real lesson here: have separate accounts for separate sites. I haven't used Stripe for years, so I'm not sure: is that totally kosher? And if you enter the same business/tax/ID details for two different accounts, will there be any problems? It'd be great to hear from someone about Stripe about this, as I know a lot of Stripe people hang around HN.

> And if you enter the same business/tax/ID details for two different accounts, will there be any problems?

I have no experience acquiring companies, but my first instincts are I would acquire a given company into a separate owned LLC, to firewall the rest of my assets from unknown snakes in the grass. If I'm doing that, plugging those LLC's details into Stripe seems like a non-issue.

Re: Stripe Atlas is nothing but a bad marriage

#15

Post by [deleted] »

thedz wrote: post #3

The initial analogy made me cringe, and to be honest, the rest of the post didn't change that impression too much. Reading past the prose and paeans to loyalty, a couple points stick out to me: > "we discovered that the specific charges flagged as fraudulent were not fraudulent charges" "where fulfillment was lagging heavily during the transition which led to some dissatisfied customers who opted to dispute charges"…

[deleted]

Re: Stripe Atlas is nothing but a bad marriage

#16

Post by badwolf »

faitswulff wrote: post #6
jasonlotito wrote: post #4

6.5% chargeback rate. This entire blog post reads like other posts of its type from people who don't understand credit card processing or how it all works. "Shortly after sending the above information we discovered that the specific charges flagged as fraudulent were not fraudulent charges. They were, in fact, due to chargebacks related to a recently acquired eCommerce store where fulfillment was lagging heavily duri…

I would count myself in the category of people who don't know exactly how this all works, but this email[0] makes it sound even worse by the end: > We calculate the dispute rate a number of ways, but the two most common are: > 1. The percentage of charges on your account that have been disputed (you are currently 23.74%) > 2. The percentage of volume on your account that has been disputed (you are currently 44.82%) […

These rates are generally dictated by the card companies. We recently had a spike in chargebacks in one of our Stripe accounts, which put us over the warning threshold.

Stripe could have handled it a lot better. They withheld payments from us (over 250k) No notifications, or anything else. They waited until we contacted their support on why our payouts weren't processing before they lectured us on how we should be doing fraud review (we do. We also pay way to much to SiftScience to mitigate that as well)

tl;dr though, Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover, etc... all have their own hard limits.

Re: Stripe Atlas is nothing but a bad marriage

#17

Post by badwolf »

goatforce5 wrote: post #13
cavisne wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually a 44% chargeback rate by volume! It only takes a little bit of reading between the lines to see the author bought a site that sold fraudulent gear, didn’t realise this for a bit and then shut it down. If stripe hadn’t frozen payouts they would be stuck holding the bag for 44 percent of the total charges in the account. The new account thing does sound beuracratic but I guess it restarts the KYC process.

I worked for a high-risk merchant, and a 44% chargeback rate is utterly insane. IIRC, internal alarms would go off and the processors would be breathing down our necks if the chargeback rate started to approach 2%.

Stripe held our payouts when we got over 1%.

If you get put into a monitoring program, it gets real expensive, real fast. Though Stripe would probably rather just ban you.

https://stripe.com/docs/disputes/monitoring-programs

Re: Stripe Atlas is nothing but a bad marriage

#18

Post by holman »

Details of fraud and chargebacks aside, I want to point out that this post really doesn't have to do with Stripe Atlas, insomuch as Stripe Atlas doesn't give you carte blanche to commit fraud on the Stripe platform.

FWIW, I'm a pretty happy Stripe Atlas customer, and it's pretty WYSIWYG, for better and for worse.

Re: Stripe Atlas is nothing but a bad marriage

#19

Post by tehwebguy »

jtchang wrote: post #12

> The percentage of volume on your account that has been disputed (you are currently 44.82%) Holy. ANY payment process will drop you after something like this. A botched purchase of another company doesn't relieve you of any of the obligations they had made.

Indeed, approaching 1% is enough to get you kicked off any non-high risk payment platform.
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