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Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled

status.stripe.com

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Re: Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled

#101

Post by steve_taylor »

Silhouette wrote: post #91
fastball wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We tried to use Paddle for our company but back when we were trialling them they didn't even have a dev environment (their suggestion was to create free products in production mode and use those to test dev/staging). At that point I nope'd out of there and moved to Stripe.

Looks like they do now have a separate sandbox system similar to other payment services. https://developer.paddle.com/getting-started/c052e9e8d265f-w... But elsewhere they also still seem to recommend doing things involving your production site for testing purposes. That seems like it's probably a bad idea that could be risky if anything goes wrong and possibly mess up things like reporting and compliance even if eve…

I've been using their sandbox environment quite successfully for the last few months. Their main competitor, FastSpring, doesn't have a sandbox yet.

There's another interesting competitor that uses Stripe: https://getrevin.com. Their pricing is cheaper than Paddle, making them the cheapest I've seen so far. Not sure if they're any good, though.

Re: Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled

#102

Post by candiddevmike »

GingerMidas wrote: post #92
candiddevmike wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, how don't you have those tax complications?

I'm referring to the international sales. We only sell within the US, state taxes are relatively easy

You must have quite the setup to calculate state, county, and local taxes.

Re: Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled

#104

Post by Lightbody »

edwinwee wrote: post #6

Edwin from Stripe here. Just to be totally clear, only a very small fraction of Stripe’s userbase is impacted by this. That said, Stripe being unavailable for even a single user is very concerning for us, and we’re fixing things as rapidly as we can. Follow this thread for updates: https://twitter.com/stripestatus/status/1561809071061155841 .

Seems like if you have tax collection on you’re gonna have a bad time, which is our situation.

I’m surprised only a small fraction of Stripe customers collect sales taxes.

Re: Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled

#105

Post by krisoft »

m_sahaf wrote: post #64
xwdv wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because otherwise you have no leverage. If you go through proper channels your request for help will sit rotting in a queue until someone decides to pick up the ticket. If you complain loudly and publicly in a popular forum, everyone’s opinion of the company will degrade the longer your cries go visibly unanswered, so it requires immediate attention. Your request gets elevated to critical.

As someone who worked as front-line support and turned into the authority who's asked to resolve complex cases, this is nonsense. They aren't playing Tetris ignoring the queue. It's more likely the front-line staff are overwhelmed and/or don't know how to cut through the corporate hoops/politics to find and deliver the fix, and/or too shy/embarrassed to admit ignorance and having to pass it to the higher-ups for some…

> They aren't playing Tetris ignoring the queue.

Nobody said that.

> likely the front-line staff are overwhelmed

Which means that the company knowingly and intentionally decided to skimp on support, or have other policies which lead to their staff being overwhelmed.

> don't know how to cut through the corporate hoops/politics to find and deliver the fix

Which means the corporation decided to skimp on their training and or efforts to streamline the issue resolution.

> and/or too shy/embarrassed to admit ignorance and having to pass it to the higher-ups for someone who knows how to fix things

Same as above.

> It's more likely going in circles because they want to resolve it within their levels without having to escalate it.

And why is that? Ah yes, because the company knowingly and intentionally set the incentives as such.

I don’t have a problem with the front line support. They are just humans like you and me. But I will have zero pitty on companies who under allocate resources to their problems and then try to hide behind their overworked support line as some meat shield.

Re: Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled

#106

Post by jeromegv »

kyleee wrote: post #48
vaidhy wrote: post #7

Did they not fire a large portion of the teams behind the tax team (acquired company)?

Ahh yes actually, the story was posted here too. It would be especially interesting if this is a case of employee retaliation

It doesn’t need to be employee retaliation but it can totally be a part of the system that goes down and the person that knew that system well is gone.

Re: Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled

#107

Post by insane_dreamer »

ecommerceguy wrote: post #28
GingerMidas wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are processors like Square any better?

Better in what way? I personally would never use a Square product (I feel the entire org has major ethical issues) however other players in this space include Braintree, Amazon Payments and a host of 3rd parties - although 3rd parties are discontinuing internet based direct gateway access such as CardConnect.

Square has more ethical issues than Amazon?

Re: Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled

#108

Post by cyral »

lovingCranberry wrote: post #86
tomnipotent wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're better off with Adyen.

OT: I just went through Adyen's prohibited businesses. Why does every major payment processor prohibit vendors of adult toys from using their payment services? I mean, those aren't even high risk businesses. Credit card fraud usually happens when you offer high priced electronics. Chargebacks usually happen when you sell digital goods like templates, ebooks, videos etc.

You need a merchant account from a high-risk processor, combined with a generic gateway like Authorize.Net. (Don't use their built in processor) The all in one solutions like Stripe or Adyen are convenient but they aren't what high-risk industries need.

Re: Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled

#110

Post by cyral »

upupandup wrote: post #82
civilized wrote: post #65

Every Stripe issue invites a flood of complaints, which is fine, but... try Better Business Bureau. They have a tracking process, they keep score, they assign a grade. By the way, Stripe responses to BBB complaints are hilarious [1]. Most of the ones I read close with an identical snippet of text dismissing the claim as "baseless", even when they admit they made a mistake. It's astonishingly inept and says a lot abou…

last time I did this, the business in question threatened with legal action and I realized BBB was NOT on the consumers side.

BBB gets money from businesses who pay for their accreditation, similar to how Yelp magically helps remove bad reviews when you pay for their services. It's a total conflict of interest. They are technically a non-profit, but that doesn't mean there execs aren't getting paid handsomely.
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