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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

#61

Post by curious_1 »

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…

Not my experience.

Working with Stripe hasn't been error free. I've had one or two nasty bugs. But the product is fluid, works, and most importantly, they have great customer support. I wouldn't mind paying a little extra for it.

I'm a relatively small fish, but they replied within hours and fixed the issue. On a Saturday. As long this "Saturday test" remains true, I'm a happy user.

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

#62

Post by loeg »

HeyImAlex wrote: post #36
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…

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.

> 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?

In the US, this was the subject of a recent class-action suit! https://www.paymentcardsettlement.com/en

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

#63

Post by ValentineC »

Meekro wrote: post #32
vfclists wrote: post #11

They are doing a Paypal. How long have they been doing this? Louis Rossmann won't be happy - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1WPDVjXDj0

I'm a long-time Stripe user who processes ~$40k per month, and I think you're being too harsh. From a business owner's perspective, PayPal is the kind of company that would shut down your account and steal the balance for 6 months if their shitty algorithm detects anything "suspicious." Your attempts to contact them can be ignored or given generic responses that tell you nothing. PayPal just doesn't care, and it show…

> From a business owner's perspective, PayPal is the kind of company that would shut down your account and steal the balance for 6 months if their shitty algorithm detects anything "suspicious." Your attempts to contact them can be ignored or given generic responses that tell you nothing.

Heh, PayPal just this month asked me to provide charity information for my personal account, and subsequently limited my receiving/sending privileges.

Phone calls to them trying to sort this out have always ended up at some call centre in the Philippines, where the agents can only tell their users that the account limitation is "for their safety".

They've also limited the personal account of a friend of mine (who's interestingly enough ex-PayPal) before, also asking for charity information.

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

#64

Post by intopieces »

zaroth wrote: post #55
intopieces wrote: post #8

Seems reasonable to me. The payment was successful, which is the service Stripe provides. Is this out of step with the industry at large?

It’s not reasonable because the cost which the fee is covering is not the cost to process the transaction. It’s three things, in order of their share of the total cost; 1) Rewards programs 2) Fraud risk 3) Interest expense The rewards are negated, because a refunded transaction earns no points. The fraud risk is zero, because the merchant has returned the funds. This leaves only a portion of the interest expense, ass…

> It’s not reasonable because the cost which the fee is covering is not the cost to process the transaction.

Who says it has to be? Businesses have all kinds of costs not directly related to the day to day transactions with customers.

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

#65

Post by derrick_jensen »

curious_1 wrote: post #61
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…

Not my experience. Working with Stripe hasn't been error free. I've had one or two nasty bugs. But the product is fluid, works, and most importantly, they have great customer support. I wouldn't mind paying a little extra for it. I'm a relatively small fish, but they replied within hours and fixed the issue. On a Saturday. As long this "Saturday test" remains true, I'm a happy user.

Honestly, I don't find their support helpful with fixing any of my issues, and asking the same question multiple times gives completely different responses. I managed to completely break the Stripe Test API (nothing works, always "in the process of deleting"), and I've been in support limbo for at least a week now.

Haven't looked into the alternatives, but I hope I can move most commerce over to Bitcoin since I can run that fairly cheap internally to the company (and bypass PCI compliance, etc)

EDIT: Maybe I was being overly critical in the first half, but in general implementation has been a bumpy experience. Most transactions on this platform are microtransactions, so it isn't that Stripe is expensive as much as I'm using it in an unconventional way, and not having a $0.30 static fee drastically changes my profit margins

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

#66

Post by pc »

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 of new functionality to Stripe since we launched in 2011. (The Stripe that launched back then did not support any non-card payment methods, non-USD currencies, non-US users, etc.) The vast majority of new features come with no new fees -- the Stripe package just gets better. For improvements that don't represent discrete new features, the changes can be non-obvious. Our goal is to quietly optimize things so that Stripe integrations continually get better without your code having to change. For example, Radar is far more effective at preventing fraud and chargebacks than it's ever been. Or, last year, we built an ML engine to automatically optimize the bitfields of card network requests. This has already generated an incremental $1 billion of revenue for Stripe users (with no additional cost).

- Testing production flows with fake numbers is tricky. (How should these charges show up for reporting purposes? If we exclude them, that introduces another discrepancy. If we include them, that means you have to then handle the downstream cash discrepancy.) It's not an intrinsically unsolvable problem but we have not yet seen a clean solution that we feel good about. As other commenters point out, making sure they're sufficiently secure is also a challenge.

- While we're proud of our books, I can assure you that the ratio of people working on improving our payments stack to publishing is about 1000:1.

All that said, it's helpful to hear how it seems from your standpoint. We're acutely aware of how much Stripe has yet to do/build. We'll continue to work hard, and I hope we can support your business for many years to come.

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

#67

Post by tomnipotent »

koolba wrote: post #59
tomnipotent wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe now you can start charging us properly for debit card transactions, instead of pocketing the difference. My company is now evaluating options to move off Stripe because of this fiasco and how it was communicated to customers, along with the complete lack of explanation of whether this impacted the % fee or just the flat $ fee.

Is that even possible? I though debit cards entered using purely digits (vs pin) have to be run through the credit card network. Is there a provider who provides debit card online processing?

In the U.S., fees on debit cards are limited based on the Durbin Amendment.

There is a different fee between PIN and signature debit, but not so much that signature debit matches credit cards.

https://www.valuepenguin.com/credit-card-processing/intercha...

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

#68

Post by edwinwee »

derrick_jensen wrote: post #65
curious_1 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not my experience. Working with Stripe hasn't been error free. I've had one or two nasty bugs. But the product is fluid, works, and most importantly, they have great customer support. I wouldn't mind paying a little extra for it. I'm a relatively small fish, but they replied within hours and fixed the issue. On a Saturday. As long this "Saturday test" remains true, I'm a happy user.

Honestly, I don't find their support helpful with fixing any of my issues, and asking the same question multiple times gives completely different responses. I managed to completely break the Stripe Test API (nothing works, always "in the process of deleting"), and I've been in support limbo for at least a week now. Haven't looked into the alternatives, but I hope I can move most commerce over to Bitcoin since I can r…

Hrm, not good. Could you add me to that email chain and I can help? (edwin@stripe.com)

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

#69

Post by manigandham »

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…

Why not use a small charge against a real card? A few $1 charges work fine and are cheap enough to ignore.

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

#70

Post by wonderwonder »

derrick_jensen wrote: post #65
curious_1 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not my experience. Working with Stripe hasn't been error free. I've had one or two nasty bugs. But the product is fluid, works, and most importantly, they have great customer support. I wouldn't mind paying a little extra for it. I'm a relatively small fish, but they replied within hours and fixed the issue. On a Saturday. As long this "Saturday test" remains true, I'm a happy user.

Honestly, I don't find their support helpful with fixing any of my issues, and asking the same question multiple times gives completely different responses. I managed to completely break the Stripe Test API (nothing works, always "in the process of deleting"), and I've been in support limbo for at least a week now. Haven't looked into the alternatives, but I hope I can move most commerce over to Bitcoin since I can r…

I've always had pretty good luck on their freenode channel
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