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

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

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree that I have no idea how this person is calculating their loss at 100k over their revenue. However, generally as in GAAP, you would recognize revenue on shipment or when a service is rendered because that would be the period in which the revenue was accrued. For example, most companies that sell on terms like NET 30 will invoice AND recognize revenue on shipment; they would not wait until payment is received on…

Yes, you can do this. But in the case of the OP recognizing the revenue prior to receiving the payment makes them liable for the taxes on that revenue and that probably isn't a very clever thing to do.

If you're accrual basis like most companies _in the U.S._, you would be obligated to do this and not recognizing would be a finding on an audit. If not, at the end of the year, companies could ship goods out reducing assets, book the corresponding cost of goods sold, and not recognize revenue until the following year.

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

#193
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We were in touch with OP over email before this post was made. We know that confirming we review cases posted here provides an incentive for bad actors to post. We wish that weren’t the case–but we do pay attention to both internal case reviews and to any public complaints where users are having a bad day (or, in some cases, profess to be having a bad day).

The only people that were in touch with me were support agents that were repeating what was said in the automated notification about payments being issued to customers after. To me it looks like it took this post, a reddit post and Twitter mentions to get someone above the "normal" support to look into the matter, and put the automated refunds on pause while you investigate the case for a third time. Nothing personal…

Do not fret. Most people who've received what they've expected to purchase will contact you to find a new means to submit any moneys. Not all will, but say 140000 euro, and items in the hundred range that shouldn't be more than 1400 purchases. This might seem like a big task, but a few days work communicating is well worth it. Yes you might end up losing some money, but some remuneration (most) is better than none. The only foreseeable problem are continuation of the online store for new orders and if you have stock that needs to be shifted soon due to renting storage space.

By the way, quoting tracking numbers would mean little to any processing company, because they tend not to accurately reflect customers who have their goods. I've been in that boat and burned a couple of times myself, one instance by a large apparently respectable phone company.

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

#194

UPDATE : Stripe has just closed our account without further notice and refunded the whole balance. When we go to our dashboard we get a query saying "Unable to load this view", so I guess that's €250.000,00 that have just vanished. Please consider if you want to use Stripe for your business.

FURHTER UPDATE : We're now able to access the acocunt and can see that "only" €28k was refunded, I assume that Stripe's reasoning is that these payments were unauthorised.

Of course these payments are not unauthorised, and this can even be proven by most of them being 3DS authenticated.

We've also received 2 new notices about both accounts balances being refunded on the 11th, one can hope that these are automated responses, and that all that Stripe wants to refund is now refunded.

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

#195
UPDATE : Stripe just decided to refund a further €68.000,00 which puts my now total loss around €150.000,00 (Stock + marketing cost factored in).

Again, Stripe's reasoning seems to be that the charges are unauthorised, which is completely impossible since 80% of the transactions have been authorised with 3DS and the customers have gone through a so-called "challenge flow".

We will try and reach out to our customers and reclaim the payment, but I'm not sure how this will go, or how much we can reclaim.

I hope my experience can be a warning to anyone considering using Stripe for their business.

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

#196

UPDATE : Stripe just decided to refund a further €68.000,00 which puts my now total loss around €150.000,00 (Stock + marketing cost factored in). Again, Stripe's reasoning seems to be that the charges are unauthorised, which is completely impossible since 80% of the transactions have been authorised with 3DS and the customers have gone through a so-called "challenge flow". We will try and reach out to our customers a…

I had read previously you'd mentioned they'd refunded 28,000 and now another 68,000 ... bringing in my mind the total of 96,000 refunded so far to your customers. At this point counting the cost of items sent out only confuses the matter, because that only matters if most of your customers opt not to repay you albeit using something different. Clearly apparently good customers opting not to repay, would be odd in a regular online business.

If you've not heard from customers it's a fair guess that either no email was sent to them to inform of a refund, or your customers are not the sort of people who check their emails every day / week. Once your customers realise I guess it'll sort it self out, even if it's a bit messy. I dare say most of your customers won't be checking their bank balances every day, and even if they do they'd have to get a break down of the balance to work out where the extra money came from.

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

#197

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 .

Every time someone posts one of these that seems to be the case. "Patrick Collison personally slapped me in the face and keyed my BMW for NO reason!" See comments where it turns out they're selling anthrax to baking blogs branded as instant yeast.
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