51–60 of 225 posts
I guess the question I'm left with is: Are you going to continue using Stripe? Because if so, then it looks like nobody learned anything and the business has little reason to change, having not even lost the unfairly-treated customer over it.
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…
Sadly, this has been a thing for a while. As a T-Mobile customer, at one point, it eventually took me to put a request via Twitter to get the matter resolved in 20 minutes as opposed to previously spending hours on the phone with tech support ( with no results to show for it ). It is, quite frankly, infuriating; especially for a telecom. edit: I genuinely do not get why it took Twitter referral in my case either ( it…
Did they give any explanation of exactly why they had temporarily stolen your $400,000? That's what would worry me the most after it's been resolved, just how arbitrary and opaque and uncommunicative their whole process is. I wonder how many other people they've screwed over with this terrible approach to customer service. We'll probably never know, it's not something they're likely to be transparent about. I'm very…
I'm guessing the risk on Stripe's side is that OP (or someone else!) is using a bunch of stolen credit cards to make purchases. If there are a lot of chargebacks, Stripe's on the hook for that.
Are there any real alternatives to Stripe? Obviously Adyen if you're in EU, PayPal/Braintree, etc, but Stripe is really the big kahuna. What about building your own with Authorize.net? Are there any old-school gateways like that left out there that are still independent? (can one do payments in the 10-100$ USD range on the blockchain? What if you don't want to go through an exchange?)
Stripe is like the Heroku of payment gateways -- great to start up quickly, great business, very profitable... but customers need to be very wary of various lock in strategies, and generally plan to have multiple providers as the business scales.
Did they give any explanation of exactly why they had temporarily stolen your $400,000? That's what would worry me the most after it's been resolved, just how arbitrary and opaque and uncommunicative their whole process is. I wonder how many other people they've screwed over with this terrible approach to customer service. We'll probably never know, it's not something they're likely to be transparent about. I'm very…
I'm guessing the risk on Stripe's side is that OP (or someone else!) is using a bunch of stolen credit cards to make purchases. If there are a lot of chargebacks, Stripe's on the hook for that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's this other thing where instead of posting your Complaint to HN you can file your Complaint in a court of law, it's kind of like an analog version of Zendesk that every company has to use.
And it takes a thousand times as long and infinitely more money than posting a complaint online.
I'd really love to get more insight into the Dec 30 -> Jan 3 time frame, since that's where everything meaningful happened... From the outside it's hard to tell WHY the lower level employees are completely incapable of driving a resolution, whether they're underpaid and apathetic, or if management has crippled them from making any decisions on their own. It's amazing that they don't have better processes in place aft…
Most companies' customer support seems to center around: 1. frustrate the customer with a long phone tree quest, hoping the customer goes away without figuring out and invoking the magic button sequence that takes them to a human, and 2. once the customer reaches a person, shower customer with empathy and politeness but do not solve their problem, hoping they just go away in frustration.
Customer support can generally only do "happy path" things that you can do on the web site yourself. Pay your bill? Sure thing. Read to you your account information? Of course. Fish your account out of purgatory because of a one in a million edge cases causing some sloppy code to divide by zero? No chance in hell. "I'm so sorry you are having that issue, let me please forward you to someone else..."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (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 - w…
EDIT: I won't be dragged into discussion about crypto. GGP asked about option, I gave one. Do your homework and don't believe random HN posters (which goes for both of us). Over and out.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (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 - w…
Actually the payment is made in crypto (BTC, ETH, also USDT if you so desire) and the fiat is paid out to the merchant. Obviously there is some exchange somewhere in the back, but neither merchant nor custumer are interacting with it. EDIT: I won't be dragged into discussion about crypto. GGP asked about option, I gave one. Do your homework and don't believe random HN posters (which goes for both of us). Over and out…
> They just sell crypto on behalf of the merchant and send them the actual money.
Did I misunderstand? If so, my bad.
[edit] BitPay is actually fascinating because they publish their merchant breakdown, or at least they used to. It's overwhelmingly all prepaid gift cards, "internet" and VPN. And the share has shifted more and more towards prepaid gift cards. [1]
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1142527/bitpay-payments-...