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Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers

#101

Post by Closi »

lucas_adlp wrote: post #70
f1shy wrote: post #62

I must be stupid... but how a refunding of 150k makes a loss of 250k? I would assume the shipped goods are less than 150k (gain margin). That plus shipping is the loss. Shipping, assuming 150, you sold about 1000 items, which at 5EUR typical shipping ist 5k. Worst case, even with interest and all that you want... who do you come to 250k? I do not want to defend Stripe (I hate all that kind of companies), but there ar…

We've sent out products to all the customers that have paid. Stripe is now "considering" refunding all these customers, while holding 150k of our generated revenue. Due to the products being bought and shipped, (and not even factoring in marketing costs) this easily equates to a total net loss of 250k for our business.

> Due to the products being bought and shipped, (and not even factoring in marketing costs) this easily equates to a total net loss of 250k for our business.

This is double counting, and not how you calculate net loss.

You can't take both a negative and a positive cash outflow, then make them both positive and add them together.

Re: Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers

#102

Post by jacquesm »

qaq wrote: post #8

Here's the kicker when you had merchant account with an "evil" old school bank you could just walk over and talk to human.

Yes, but evil old school bank likely would not process 'card not present' transactions at all.

Re: Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers

#104

Post by blowski »

cm2187 wrote: post #58
blowski wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the OP. Nobody should be choosing a critical dependency based on anecdotes like this, which tell only one side. If there were a post that aggregated such anecdotes with a more neutral stance, that might be more interesting.

OK, but what is the better alternative then?

Alternative to what?

Re: Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers

#105

Post by jpgvm »

simfree wrote: post #72
jpgvm wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standard merchant gateway that has a relationship with your business bank. Ensure you procure that relationship through your bank with someone you actually speak to, ideally face to face but atleast on the phone. You pay slightly more than Stripe and the APIs generally suck but you don't end up with these sorts of impossible situations.

Rates on standard merchant accounts are generally lower or significantly lower than Stripe if your processing a bit of volume ($10k+ a month).

Yeah this is true but it's heavily reliant on volume, on low volume Stripe came out on top last time I looked. I still went for a merchant account though, much less business risk and I can walk down the street and ask my small business account rep what is going on if something strange happens to it.

Re: Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers

#106

Post by threatofrain »

lucas_adlp wrote: post #66
Nathanael_M wrote: post #14

Out of curiosity, can you be more specific about what you sell? Consumer electronics like vapes or consumer electronics like Alibaba hoverboards or consumer electronics like a quality, entry level set of computer speakers? Stripe seems to be pretty sensitive towards certain industries and I'd like to see if this holds true here.

I cannot be super specific due to the nature of business strategy. If I share accurate info about what and how we sell things, It's very easy for opportunists and competitors to undertake us in this specific project while our processing solution is down temporarily. What I will say though, is that we're not speaking vapes or anything borderline, more like kitchen and household appliances, and so on.

It's really difficult to believe that you're basically selling ordinary household appliances but that for reasons of business strategy you can't even reveal what you're selling.

Re: Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers

#107

Post by jacquesm »

hknmtt wrote: post #103
jacquesm wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does PayPal own Stripe?

They don't own it fully but are early investors. And I am not talking about musk and thiel, who also invested(you can even read it on wiki).

By that reading I 'own' a lot of companies, and yet it doesn't feel that way. Being an investor in a company does not mean you own that company, at best you have fractional ownership and depending on the kind of shares issued and whether or not there was a board seat attached to the investment you may have a greater or larger degree of influence on the company. But to the best of my knowledge PayPal does not have a majority stake in Stripe (and neither does Braintree). Stripe has more than 50 investors at this point.

Re: Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers

#109

Post by jlokier »

coupdejarnac wrote: post #47

Another reminder to have another payment processor ready to go. I need to see some horror stories about authorize.net or the big banks for comparison. At least the banks have staff you can talk with.

I agree, it is important to have at least two payment providers, ideally running them in parallel. It is still a problem if you're taking recurring payments, because you can't transfer customer payment details to the other when one of them stops service, but it's still better than having no backup.

> At least the banks have staff you can talk with.

Some banks do, some don't. I posted two days ago of a problem with a bank that turned out to have only useless staff you can't really talk with when there's a serious problem, unless you post to social media: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34234259

Ironically my comment was on another Stripe customer complaint HN article. The cash amout on that was even higher than the current one, $400k. Fortunately the issue with Stripe did get resolved, but the customer had to make their complaint public first and get it noticed by upvotes, before it was dealt with.

Re: Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers

#110

Post by theteapot »

Nathanael_M wrote: post #14

Out of curiosity, can you be more specific about what you sell? Consumer electronics like vapes or consumer electronics like Alibaba hoverboards or consumer electronics like a quality, entry level set of computer speakers? Stripe seems to be pretty sensitive towards certain industries and I'd like to see if this holds true here.

I asked the last guy that raised a Stripe ticket on HN what they sold and they wouldn't tell us. Given lack of transparency seems fair to assume they've been deemed prohibited businesses by Stripe -- https://stripe.com/legal/restricted-businesses.
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