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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

#231

Post by conradfr »

officeplant wrote: post #39
privateSFacct wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually - it's mostly because of cost / benefit shifting. A card can attract USERS by increasing the rewards it offers -> and charging MERCHANTS for the reward. So visa infinite cards might charge a much higher swipe fee to a merchant, and then make available cash back + first party car insurance + lots of bennies to the holders of these "elite" cards. They justify this to merchants by claiming that these "elite" us…

Meanwhile it's become the new hot thing locally (Southern USA) to charge credit and debit card users a "convenience fee" sometimes as high as 35 cents a transaction. Everyone went from offering discounts to cash users to simply charging card users more.

I thought it was illegal but I may have been wrong.

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

#232

Post by mercwear »

ativzzz wrote: post #174
bradgessler wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In house solutions. Once a company becomes large enough where paying a company like Stripe's fees becomes larger than hiring enough people to create and maintain an internal billing system, then you do it yourself. This is something that companies that are near public company size do since the amount of work required to meet payment regulations alone, not to mention all of the infrastructure to support things like su…

I have migrated 2 companies away from internal billing systems (one went to Stripe and the other went to Chargify). The amount of hacks that went into maintaining these internal systems was shocking. One company literally devised its own currency to deal with the complexity.

Managing and developing your own billing system is a almost always a bad idea, no matter how big your company is. There is a high likelihood that you will end up running a business within a business if you go that route.

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

#233

Post by rfrey »

martin_a wrote: post #230
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.

Sounds like Google. Either you know somebody deep in there or you are lost with your request. Your problem.

In the case of Google we have a supertanker full of anecdotes of them ignoring customers with problems. In the case of Stripe we have no evidence their customer service is non existent outside social media flareups. To the contrary,they seem to have a pretty good reputation.

So no, not like google at all. That somebody gets a response from a VP on hacker news is not evidence they will get no response outside hacker news.

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

#234

Post by commoner »

jasonkester wrote: post #224
commoner wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For what it's worth, the success of my business doesn't hinge on whether Stripe gives me a dollar. I hope yours doesn't either.

The fee is only $1 when the transaction amount is $24.14. The fee is $29.30 for a $1,000 transaction. For industries with lower margins or higher refund rates, Stripe's refusal to return the fee on refunded transactions is a problem. Regardless, Stripe's nickel-and-diming is not something to be grateful for in any industry when there are competitors that don't do the same.

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

#235

Post by agopaul »

patio11 wrote: post #158
BrandonMarc wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is meant by "free" revenue? I'm wondering how the one leads to the other. Does this mean, lower processing fee/less need to increase processing fees?

Businesses invest in product development and marketing to bring a customer to them. The customer is convinced of the value of the thing they want to buy and puts in their credit card number. Sometimes it doesn't work, for example because a poorly understood interaction of systems at their bank decides the charge is likely fraudulent. (Ask me about how a particular US bank has caught 17 of the last 0 times a fraudster…

Appreciate the explanation. We actually noticed a huge improvement since last summer with charges made with Stripe. Still, we lost a few thousands €€ in these years because of customers' banks rejecting our transactions. I hope that one day this problem will be gone.

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

#236

Post by nkohari »

on_and_off wrote: post #173
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 hope stripe changes it's ways here, but they have been a large disappointment over the last 4 years or so after a solid start. Sadly the same experience here. Getting them to fix the many many basic issues of their client libraries is hell, testing is no better and library updates often break your testing scenarios.

I work on developer experience at Stripe. If you'd like to email me at my HN handle @stripe.com, I'd love to hear more about the trouble you've run into.

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

#237

Post by zip1234 »

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.

Stripe just started accepting checks. It was very much missing given the 'creative' ways that enterprise customers like to pay.

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

#238

Post by poxrud »

bastardoperator wrote: post #38
edwinwee wrote: post #5

Some more context: this has been around for a couple years (for only new Stripe users). Payments are costing more to process. Card network fees have been gradually increasing over the years. Stripe has kept this at bay for its longtime users for as long as we could, even as it's been getting more expensive. But with the water rising across the whole pond, we sadly have to start charging for some of these things.

Can this be further clarified? Are they keeping the 2.9 percent of the transaction and the transaction fee? If so, run away as fast as possible. If not, the transaction fee is still too high. Plenty of banks will will negotiate a much better fee with specific commitments, but it’s not too bad if you find value in the other features.

Yes they are keeping the 2.9 percent plus the +0.30 transaction fee. In my case since we are in Canada they are keeping 3.5%

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

#239

Post by mattferderer »

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…

That happened to a non-profit I help as well.

We were attacked by someone using different IP addresses testing out credit cards. Stripe caught a lot of these but surprisingly it seemed several went through that we had to refund & pay the transaction fee for. A lot of these didn't even require the CVC check it seemed.

We were able to get fairly good support, 100 times better than most places I deal with.

Unfortunately we had to switch to Radar for Teams to put in fairly basic checks such as making sure CVC verification happens before accepting the card. This costs a bit extra per transaction.

At the end of the day we were able to get it solved. Stripe puts plenty of human resources on helping & they have fairly good documentation. It does really stink that we need to purchase Radar for Teams just to add a few basic rules in place to prevent scammers like this. We lost around $100 that could have went to helping families whose kids have cancer which always sucks. We also had to implement an "invisible" Google Captcha which I wasn't a fan of. This could have been a lot worse though which is what troubled me the most.

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