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Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#191

Post by manquer »

rco8786 wrote: post #93
ianhawes wrote: post #40

I will take the OP's story at face value, but I think a common theme in these sort of posts is the "Stripe not happy with my business model" angle which typically does not actually include any details about the business model. For example, a few weeks ago the founder of Tailwind tweeted [0] about how Stripe had shut down their account when they were set to launch the Tailwind Job Board, despite many other job boards…

What is wrong with a job board or a coaching business?

Nothing is wrong.

The risk profiles are different. That is only thing the payment processor cares about, same reason why adult services get shunned. Not because they are puritans, it is because of risk of frauds and chargebacks etc are much higher .

Coaching is a service unlike Tailwind the software that can varying success and satisfaction levels customers probably do higher chargebacks and stripe's automated systems or low level staff with a playbook likely rejected it until someone senior got to see the bad press and got it fixed.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#192

Post by rchaud »

gfodor wrote: post #55
politelemon wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your sentence caught me off guard, maybe I am reading it wrong. Do you mean email as a payment system, or do you mean email as an example of a decentralized system?

The latter - a system that is like e-mail (decentralized) but allows people to send money to each other. We have many such systems being developed, but you get downvoted on HN for promoting them, since people assume you are a scammer, a criminal, etc.

How can they still be in development when the underlying tech has been available for 12 years or so?

In the real world, there is no anonymous e-money that doesn't end up having to be laundered back into good old cash.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#193

Post by ceejayoz »

belinder wrote: post #174
thaumaturgy wrote: post #146

It looks like there's a common flaw in modern abuse detection systems: they have no long-term memory. Stripe's abuse detection should be factoring in the age and long-term activity of the account, and support staff should be able to provide additional information to customers with established histories. Some of Stripe's policies make sense when dealing with new accounts, but a recurring factor in these complaints is…

long-term active accounts can get hacked. I absolutely agree with support staff needing to provide more information, but they can't just blanket whitelist any old account

They could significantly raise the threshold for automated action, though.

Did a ten year old account that does $1k a year suddenly bill $1M? Sure, flag that... but maybe give them a phone call, too.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#195

Post by downrightmike »

orionint wrote: post #121

Used to work for a “high risk” payment processor, we inherited tons of accounts that were terminated by Stripe, Square, and PayPal. Here’s one small bit of inside info that may help the newer businesses out there: Most real payment processors (e.g. banks, merchant services companies) “underwrite” a company BEFORE allowing them to process. Underwriting means they look over the business model, financials, etc and make…

And don't they use a bank's services so they don't have to go through the normal 'if you're going to be a bank' scrutiny? I'm guessing that they have a requirement from the banking service to vet anything that would normally need underwriting otherwise.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#196

Post by aspectmin »

Sounds like it may be time for some legislation requiring payment processors and other service providers (eg hosting/email) to provide an escalation process - probably human review - in cases such as these.

Although I agree that there are a lot of TOS violators out there, there are also legitimate businesses suffering real and tangible harm from these actions.

This case in particular sounds interesting. They were reviewed and the problem was fixed, and they were then again given the big ban hammer. In this case, I suspect the liability must shift to the provider for causing harm through failed processes/systems under their control.

Just my 2c

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#197

Post by BiteCode_dev »

eropple wrote: post #164
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if ChargeBee bans you, you are still dead because that's a single point of failure. No, you should have several payment processors, and rotate them regularly to check they work.

It's been a while since I dealt with this side of ecommerce - how can you have several payment processors, and rotate them, without having to handle card data yourself? (Most folks aren't really equipped to do that.)

You use several API, attach one provider per customer to divide the risks. When one provider bails out, you onboard new customers and new payment on the other payment provider.

Then you only loose the recurring payments on the lost provider that are on hold, and you are not dying, so you can resolve that problem using a lawyer.

This is crisis management, not technical perfection that you need for those situations.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#198

Post by apeace »

I had a very similar experience, except it was on our launch day.

We hadn't charged a single live customer yet, but we had done plenty of tests using the Stripe testing environment. So we go live with a huge launch event, and we have customers signing up in droves. When they get to the last step -- payment -- they get an error.

Logging in to the dashboard I didn't see any indication that there was anything wrong with our account. No alerts or notices. We had already gone through the approval process you go through when signing up, and been told we were approved.

The thing that surprised me the most was that there was just no indication anywhere that our account would not be able to charge cards. Wouldn't it make sense for there to be an indicator somewhere that just says "Not ready yet"?

Apparently, they had never even begun reviewing/vetting us since the time we signed up for the account months earlier. We reached out to customer support and it took them about two weeks to get us activated. And, similar to OP, they never gave us a shred of information about what was going on. I still don't know to this day what the issue was.

Next time I build something with Stripe I'm going to test it in production before launching, with my own real credit card!

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