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Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

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Re: Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

#41

Post by soco »

lol768 wrote: post #9

> But, there is a balance between automation and manual review. When someone like me gets caught up in an automated system there needs to be better ways of letting support help that person. This keeps happening, again and again. It's not just Stripe, Google is a huge offender when it comes to automated decision-making and next-to-no human support when it inevitably goes wrong. GDPR explicitly requires that companies…

I imagine once you're locked out of the account whatever that is, relying on GDPR will mean getting a lawyer and all that - by no means a quick or cheap way to sort out your problem. GDPR will only be helpful after applying enough fines and lost processes, finally forcing Google/Stripe/etc to rethink their support strategy. Which means continuous hassle for today's customers and blaming GDPR for being "toothless" (blame set usually by the same people which claim the invisible hand would sort it out automagically).

Re: Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

#42

Post by flopriore »

throwawayapples wrote: post #10

Are there any real alternatives to Stripe? Obviously Adyen if you're in EU, PayPal/Braintree, etc, but Stripe is really the big kahuna. What about building your own with Authorize.net? Are there any old-school gateways like that left out there that are still independent? (can one do payments in the 10-100$ USD range on the blockchain? What if you don't want to go through an exchange?)

Revolut

Re: Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

#43

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

Lots of posts here along the lines of "it's not good when you need to resort to social media shaming to get customer support", but I'll take the contrarian view, or at least explain why this dynamic exists.

The past 20 years has seen an explosion in Internet services, but a fundamental (often unspoken) quality of these services is that they must keep individualized customer support costs very low in order to be profitable. I mean, just look at Google, which has billions of end users. You can argue that Google takes in a ton of money, but it's not hard to see that if every Google user just had a single support call requiring 30 minutes of a support rep's time a year, that Google's profitability would tank (never mind the difficulty in hiring that many reps in the first place).

So all these services invest a ton into automated support and systems to ensure the vast majority of users never need support from a real human. That usually works well, except when you get some of these edge cases, and, very importantly, these edge cases are usually the worst when the customer behavior, while totally legit, "looks" pretty similar to malicious usage.

So, in that case, I'm glad that these back-channel avenues still exist when someone gets stuck in the machine. I wish there were a better alternative, but I really am at a loss to think what that could be. The social media channel essentially acts as a filter, as only things that are real problems are likely to get upvotes or lots of visibility. A trade off for users being able to get tons of value for (relatively) very cheap prices is that the "tail end" of support requests is usually pretty nightmarish.

Re: Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

#44

Post by eeemmmooo »

sovietmudkipz wrote: post #14

Emotionally speaking (and assuming $400k is a significantly higher sales target than normal), what was it like to see the business success before you realized there was a lock on your accounts? What was it like after realizing the locks?

Well luckily for us we are big enough to be able to handle this, but a lot of smaller companies aren't able to. These are 6+ year old accounts that have been very steady, so it wasn't like we just opened our Stripe account last month and started doing large volume. Overall it was very frustrating and time wasting. That's the main thing. I was confident that we didn't do anything wrong and that we would get it figured out eventually. But, other people might not have the ability to wait as long as we were able to. We definitely had a couple accounts go negative before we loaned money into that accounts though.

Re: Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

#45

Post by bytehowl »

moralestapia wrote: post #3
eeemmmooo wrote: post #2

Nov 28: Cyber Monday my business had a sale that spiked our revenue on that day. I believe this is what kicked off this whole thing. I believe that Stripe has automated systems in place to put accounts into review when something like this happens. I have no problem with that, and understand there are anti money laundering laws that they need to abide by. Nov. 29: I received an email from Stripe that 6 of our accounts…

As is the case with this kind of threads, it's quite embarrassing (for Stripe) that HN is their customer support outlet. Just as HN is great for showing up stuff and building brand awareness, the opposite is true as well; for me, at least, every time I see issues like this it erodes my perception of Stripe and makes me a bit averse of using their services.

There's no better way to make companies fix your issues than publicly dragging them through the mud.

I had a relatively minor issue with a paid battle pass in Paladins, a F2P game by Hi-Rez. After they had stonewalled me for over a month, until the battle pass itself ran out, I tried to stir up a shitstorm on like 5 relevant subreddits. My post failed to really take root on most of them, but it got to frontpage of the Nintendo Switch sub. My issue got resolved within a couple of hours.

Re: Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

#46

Post by Trias11 »

DevX101 wrote: post #5

I'm glad your issues were sorted, but I'm uncomfortable with the idea that you need to make a social media post to get a customer service issue resolved. This isn't just stripe. I see this with many other companies on social media. I don't post on Twitter, and I'd rather not put my account details for some service I use in a public forum. It's starting to seem like for too many companies, resolving public complaints…

Customer support is a liability and every large company will allocate absolutely minimal possible resources to any liability.

This of course can backfire via social media into negative reputation and some repeated bad behaviors can landslide into class action.

But large companies are willing to accept such risk and will continue such pattern.

Re: Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

#47

Post by cjbgkagh »

DevX101 wrote: post #5

I'm glad your issues were sorted, but I'm uncomfortable with the idea that you need to make a social media post to get a customer service issue resolved. This isn't just stripe. I see this with many other companies on social media. I don't post on Twitter, and I'd rather not put my account details for some service I use in a public forum. It's starting to seem like for too many companies, resolving public complaints…

Someday it’ll be cheaper to suppress negative views on social media than to address them. Until then I’ll enjoy the good times that come with being able to shame big companies in public.

Re: Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

#48

Post by nikanj »

DevX101 wrote: post #5

I'm glad your issues were sorted, but I'm uncomfortable with the idea that you need to make a social media post to get a customer service issue resolved. This isn't just stripe. I see this with many other companies on social media. I don't post on Twitter, and I'd rather not put my account details for some service I use in a public forum. It's starting to seem like for too many companies, resolving public complaints…

Making the post is not enough, you also have to get it to the front page of Reddit or HN

Re: Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

#49

Post by arcticbull »

bornfreddy wrote: post #32
throwawayapples wrote: post #10

Are there any real alternatives to Stripe? Obviously Adyen if you're in EU, PayPal/Braintree, etc, but Stripe is really the big kahuna. What about building your own with Authorize.net? Are there any old-school gateways like that left out there that are still independent? (can one do payments in the 10-100$ USD range on the blockchain? What if you don't want to go through an exchange?)

> (can one do payments in the 10-100$ USD range on the blockchain? What if you don't want to go through an exchange?) Yes, there are quite a few of them. For smaller sums KYC is usually not needed. No exchange needed either - as a customer you just send crypto to the payment address they give you, and as a merchant you receive your funds (minus some fee) in either fiat or crypto. No exchange needed in either case. As…

> (can one do payments in the 10-100$ USD range on the blockchain? What if you don't want to go through an exchange?)

No, you can't because there's no dollars on the blockchain, only varying degrees of unregistered and unregulated money market fund ranging from something fairly reasonable (USDC) to the Reserve Primary Fund that broke the buck in 2008 (USDT, UST).

To send dollars you have to go through an exchange - well two, actually.

BitPay is an exchange. They just sell crypto on behalf of the merchant and send them the actual money. This is the point where you'd run into AML/KYC/etc issues. Getting money on and off exposes you to massive counterparty risk that could just leave you a creditor in the Bahamas.

You have to combine blockchain fees, exchange fees, forex risk, counter-party risk and legal/compliance risk - plus all blockchain transactions have to be reported with their cost basis on your taxes. If you're trying to do it 'right' you will pay wildly more for anything on the blockchain because decentralization is significantly less efficient.

Re: Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

#50

Post by haliskerbas »

eole666 wrote: post #30

Stripe seems really expensive with poor support... Apparently they take more than 1.4% of your earning. For $400K, it's more than 11 200$. With that money you could hire a developer for a month or two and make him/her create a payment platform adapted to your needs and under your control.

I'm not sure who would be willing to build a PCI, AML, KYC, compliant payment service that can accept credit and debit cards from most countries, for $11k USD.
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