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Stripe refunds: fees from the original charge are not returned

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Re: Stripe refunds: fees from the original charge are not returned

#211

Post by dkroy »

burningion wrote: post #88
pc wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I'm one of Stripe's cofounders.) Thanks for the candid feedback. A few quick thoughts -- - This is not a new policy change -- it's been our pricing for all new users since 2017. (The news is that we're now applying this pricing to Stripe's older users, in part as a response to some price increases that the card networks are making.) - Our policy on refunds is pretty much the same as Braintree's. - We've added a lot…

A few months back, I was hit with an attack from a spammer, who managed to place a few hundred orders through my Stripe checkout. It seems they were attempting to place thousands of orders, and looking for functional credit card information. When I reached out to support, they acknowledged that this was a type of attack, and I needed to manually go back and unapprove all of these purchases coming from a single IP add…

Just to be clear in this example a chargeback wouldn't have happened. A chargeback can only happen if there was a valid credit card that made a purchase that requested a reversal of the money transfer.

Re: Stripe refunds: fees from the original charge are not returned

#212

Post by GeneralTspoon »

leesalminen wrote: post #181
longtermd wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I would love Stripe 10X more if they'd offer much lower prices. Their fees become really huge as your business grows beyond 50k MRR

Idk, we’re at 5x that and the stripe fees are such a small part of our overall costs that it hasn’t been worth it to optimize there yet. We’ve found so many other places to optimize over time with bigger cost savings. We just revamped our hosting on AWS and saved $6k/mo or so. Totally worth it.

It highly depends on the price of the product you’re selling.

If you’re selling 2.99 monthly subscriptions, then Stripe is eating ~13% of your revenue (30c + 2.9%). Or ~$6k per month in the grandparent commenter’s case ($30k in your case).

If you’re selling 99.99 monthly subscriptions, then it’s only ~3% of revenue.

Contrast this to PayPal who offer a “micro payments” solution for such cases - where it’s a flat 5% + 5c fee.

Re: Stripe refunds: fees from the original charge are not returned

#213

Post by pamonrails »

bradgessler wrote: post #155
btmorex wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal experience is that all subscription management platforms fall over when you're doing enterprise SaaS. At a certain level (because literally your most valuable customers insist), you have to deal with credit cards, ACH, wire transfers, and checks. On top of that: custom plans, all sorts of weird line items and discounts, prepays, etc. And then you usually want reporting in multiple different formats (e.g.…

I’m curious if any other HNers know of solutions out there that solve these problems.

Take a look at open-source solutions, specifically Kill Bill [1] (disclaimer, I'm a core contributor)

It provides a subscription management platform with all the features you would expect out of the box (recurring billing, plans management, dunning, notifications, etc.), but with also a plugin framework where you can implement your own billing logic.

You can continue to use processors like Stripe to handle the recurring charges (and compliance associated with storing cards), but they are only used to charge the payment methods. The mess that OP mentions stays in-house, where you have tighter control over it.

[1] https://killbill.io/

Re: Stripe refunds: fees from the original charge are not returned

#214

Post by pentae »

btown wrote: post #40

There's a vast payments ecosystem beyond Stripe that lets you avoid this. With companies like Spreedly to provide almost-Stripe-quality APIs and PCI-compliant card vaulting at only a flat cost, and a massive amount of "merchant account providers" a quick Google away that can hook into Authorize.net and then into Spreedly, you can end up at 1.75% or less depending on your industry, and the flexibility to dynamically r…

Fixed monthly costs are great.

But Starting at 5 cents per API call? Hard pass.

Re: Stripe refunds: fees from the original charge are not returned

#215

Post by commoner »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #206
joecool1029 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Translation: Come to HN with your problems and you'll get the VIP treatment while there's a spotlight on the company. Attempting to find an answer as an outsider lead me to this PR release from last year: https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/chargeback-protection < It makes me assume that if the merchant wasn't paying that extra fee they are going to be slammed.

He's given an honest answer, the situation has to be checked. You don't know that the poster is 100% honest also. Patio has always been transparent and honest, long before he joined Stripe ;)

patio11 gave a nonanswer, which is hardly transparent.

> a human who cares about your success

Regarding honesty, if Stripe "cares about your success", Stripe would relinquish processing fees for all refunded transactions (regardless of whether they are fraudulent) just like Square and Amazon Pay do.

Re: Stripe refunds: fees from the original charge are not returned

#216

Post by temptemptemp111 »

pc wrote: post #66
mchusma wrote: post #33

Note: this is different than Braintree and Amazon payments, which either refund in full or simply charge only the $0.30 fee. Stripe is now at or near the most expensive here relative to the competition. The idea that they have been doing customers a favor is not accurate. I have used stripe for years, but they are a company that has continued to make things worse with every update, versus AWS which has my trust they…

(I'm one of Stripe's cofounders.) Thanks for the candid feedback. A few quick thoughts -- - This is not a new policy change -- it's been our pricing for all new users since 2017. (The news is that we're now applying this pricing to Stripe's older users, in part as a response to some price increases that the card networks are making.) - Our policy on refunds is pretty much the same as Braintree's. - We've added a lot…

What would you recommend for a Stripe-backed SMB who has to turn away dozens of users per month because they only have some kind of "bank card" (which is normal in many European countries now). This business doesn't currently have the budget to implement support for all of these card types (Stripe UK does have support for most of them, it seems).

Re: Stripe refunds: fees from the original charge are not returned

#218

Post by seanwilson »

rblatz wrote: post #48
polemic wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ..don't test production checkout flows.. That's good advice. Payment providers have test gateways and cards for you to test your code against. While it might be a minor convenience for you to have 'fake' cards in their production system, the only thing they have to gain is a potentially serious fraud loophole (at best), or an expensive footgun for you. Don't "test" checkout flows in production unless you're using r…

Agreed, test environments exist for a reason, if you don’t trust your test environment to accurately replicate prod then you need to clean that up.

Do you mean this in general or for Stripe? For the former, you have to run some tests on production after initial setup and major changes surely? API keys could be wrong for a start and a lot of web services don't give you a programmatic way to sync settings between environments.

Re: Stripe refunds: fees from the original charge are not returned

#219

Post by disiplus »

ubercow13 wrote: post #43
HeyImAlex wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty evil! I imagine the card companies have an explicit rule that, in order to accept their cards, a merchant can't charge their users any extra fee? I wonder if some regulation were created that bans rules like that from existence whether this would change tomorrow. Kroger stopped supporting Visa cards for a minute and I realized that's literally all I carry.

The opposite law already exists in the EU - merchants aren't allowed to charge users extra for card purchases

the intent was to dissalow discrimination cash vs card. i know eu likes that electric payments, it a lot easier to track.

but what with the fees from card a vs card b.

Re: Stripe refunds: fees from the original charge are not returned

#220

Post by [deleted] »

abduhl wrote: post #190
patio11 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry that happened to you. Could you email me at this handle at stripe.com? I want to look into why we didn’t auto-detect that surge in suspicious transactions. We’re here to support startups. If you ever have a unique circumstance, write us; we’ll try to be reasonable, in the same fashion that your hosting provider will try to be reasonable if an engineer e.g. fumble fingers a deploy and briefly turns on a larg…

While this is an interesting response, it strictly does not the answer the poster’s question. Would they be liable for the fees for an attack like this?

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