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TIFU by using Stripe as a payment processor for my small business

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Re: TIFU by using Stripe as a payment processor for my small business

#251

Post by MauranKilom »

vilfredoparet0 wrote: post #178

A quote from Patrick Collison from one of the last "HN support threads": "We actually have an ongoing project to reduce the occurrence of these mistaken rejections by 90% by the end of this year. I think we'll succeed at it. (They're already down 50% since earlier this year.)" At this point it is obvious that he/his PR staff are lying. The only question is: What are some good Stripe alternatives?

> At this point it is obvious that he/his PR staff are lying.

Without taking any stance on the problem at hand: How does an N=1 sample make it "obvious" that a 50% or 90% reduction has not taken place?

Re: TIFU by using Stripe as a payment processor for my small business

#252

Post by powerhour »

thiscatis wrote: post #49

Watch the Stripe apologist come out in force soon. They’ll brand you as 100% running a crypto CP arms dealing coke selling dark net platform owner because surely YC darling Stripe would never mess up like this. Truth is they are just horrible.

You called it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32263429

Re: TIFU by using Stripe as a payment processor for my small business

#254

Post by InitialLastName »

Aspos wrote: post #173
Ayesh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a different HN thread that has no or positive reaction to Stripe, you'd be seeing many praises for Stripe. For local businesses, perhaps your local bank has a better solution? They will be cheaper (if they use networks other than Visa/Master), and often has zero fees when you withdraw money to a bank account. Here in my country, for a business that only caters to local customers, I pay about 2% for payments with n…

Don't know what country you are from but guess your acquiring bank gets orders of magnitude less fraud than Stripe does so your bank can afford to take your calls. It boils down to wildly skewed regulatory environment in the US.

They probably have orders of magnitude less revenue with which to pay customer service agents than Stripe has (or would have, if they hadn't delegated their customer service to the machine in the sky).

We see this in many circumstances: centralization and scale are great for efficiency, but bad for resilience.

Re: TIFU by using Stripe as a payment processor for my small business

#255

Post by austenallred »

civilized wrote: post #236
patio11 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I have observed in other contexts ( https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1463749947858165761 ), many people who say "Ugh, I cannot reach a real human" have in fact spoken to several humans, repeatedly and at length, and are imprecisely stating their desire to speak to a person who would agree with their view of the facts and swiftly enact the resolution that they prefer. We offer (human-powered, somewhat obviously?)…

> imprecisely stating their desire to speak to a person who would agree with their view of the facts and swiftly enact the resolution that they prefer. Wow, one reply in and we're already seeing open contempt for this type of troublesome customer. What nerve, expecting a payment processor to promptly process payments and make funds accessible to the account holder. This reply is going to look monumentally bad if the…

The Reddit thread shows that OP has interacted with Stripe through Twitter DMs at a minimum.

Re: TIFU by using Stripe as a payment processor for my small business

#256

Post by joshstrange »

JonathanBeuys wrote: post #206

How much does Stripe charge for this service? Say you are a vendor who sells 1000 products a month for $100 each. So $100,000 in monthly revenue, split into 1000 payments. How much would you pay to Stripe per month? And how quickly can you move incoming payments away from Stripe?

Unless you have a bulk deal (which you won't even at 1.2M/annual, though you are close IIRC) you are paying 2.9% + $0.30 (also assuming you aren't using any extras).

> How much would you pay to Stripe per month?

So ($100,000 * 0.029) + (1000 * $0.30) = $3,200 / mo

> And how quickly can you move incoming payments away from Stripe?

Not an easy question. Depends a lot on your payment stack and how you implemented Stripe. I can say that for myself it took ~100 hours to fully move everything over (both online and in-person payment system) as a solo dev. I ended up moving back to Stripe because the alternatives suck even more, or at least the one I picked.

Re: TIFU by using Stripe as a payment processor for my small business

#257

Post by Spooky23 »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #67

This isn't surprising to me, and I don't think less of Stripe for doing this. It appears everybody is jumping to conclusions. Saying Stripe is "stealing" is laughable. There is a tremendous amount of fraud abound. Payment service providers like Stripe sit in between businesses and credit card companies, who proxy banks, who proxy customers. Banks are pretty solid, as are credit card companies, so the transitive natur…

Federal law requires that banks hold you harmless from certain perils. Your risk for the $3000 computer is limited to $50.

Money is not held until cleared. Credit cards are a cash flow business and settle very quickly, but contract terms allow the credit card to recover chargebacks or other losses by nabbing future cash flows.

My guess is the issue that triggered this is that a big transaction is a risk as a chargeback may not be recoverable as there is no baseline level of activity. Or… they suspect that the merchant is getting a cash advance outside of the terms of the contract.

Other than the lack of process to resolve the hold, I always reserve judgement on stuff like this as you never get the full story.

Re: TIFU by using Stripe as a payment processor for my small business

#258

Post by thallium205 »

mission_failed wrote: post #128
thallium205 wrote: post #91

It's called placing a reserve on the account and it is something any payment processor will do to a merchant account.

Yes banks regularly seize money from accounts for hundreds of days and refuse to discuss it with paying customers /s

Actually, they do. And they will hold reserves on accounts for many months to over a year if they suspect it may be fraud. The acquiring bank does this because the risk of a chargeback is high and their ability to recoup the funds may be diminished with a small account.

I've been in high risk merchant processing for almost a decade. The merchant may never get the money back until they close the account completely and wait half a year for a check in the mail.

Re: TIFU by using Stripe as a payment processor for my small business

#259

Post by apocalyptic0n3 »

hnarn wrote: post #215
redeeman wrote: post #79

This "rant" is in general, and not related to OPs case I would strongly recommend to not rely on stripe, their service level has become a joke. I get it, they have a nice API, their system is technically nice in many ways, and they are (or atleast were ~5 years ago) way easier to deal with for developers than the "old" players on the market. but they are kinda like google, their support is pretty much non existent wh…

Which “old ones” are you referring to more specifically?

Authorize.net is the old one that Stripe always seems to be compared against. And in that race... Stripe has already crossed the finish line before Authorize.net has taken its first step.

Re: TIFU by using Stripe as a payment processor for my small business

#260

Post by thallium205 »

joshmanders wrote: post #184
thallium205 wrote: post #91

It's called placing a reserve on the account and it is something any payment processor will do to a merchant account.

A reserve is to make sure that the funds are there to cover the check in the event it may bounce. Checks do not take 120+ days to complete.

Credit card chargebacks can be initiated a half a year or more after a transaction has occured so yes, the reserve is in place to reduce the risk of losing money of the merchant bank from this event.
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