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Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled

status.stripe.com

61–70 of 211 posts

Re: Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled

#61

Stripe has been pretty bad for us lately. Downtime yes, but also slashed our corporate card limits with no explanation and refused to restore them despite our bank writing letters supporting our position. We've been with them for 10 years and their customer service is atrocious on this position, which is unfortunate since historically it's been quite good. We went through the arduous process of switching our corporat…

Sorry for the issues here—could you email me at edwin@stripe.com?

This is not a serious way to run a business. Unless ypu’re google.

Re: Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty funny in hindsight. > If/when we switch, we'll probably just go to a bare bones payment processor that is much cheaper than Stripe with less support. Also what we're considering right about now

Even I can see the humor in it. You are right! I hate to switch off Stripe, but the premium I'm paying is theoretically for better support and developer-friendly actions. I'm not getting that right now, so... why am I paying a premium? Years ago their customer service slashed our rates because of our increased volume and even pc himself reached out to me about a technical matter (and the company was not small). Over…

Anecdotally: I've been looking to get answers from Stripe, about fees-related questions that either make my proposed use viable or unviable, and I've received nothing but copied & pasted email replies, a week+ later (or not at all), which essentially ignore what I've asked. Incredibly frustrating.

When I mention the experience to friends, they joke that I have Stockholm Syndrome; to want to continue pursuing them, despite their complete disregard.

Re: Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even I can see the humor in it. You are right! I hate to switch off Stripe, but the premium I'm paying is theoretically for better support and developer-friendly actions. I'm not getting that right now, so... why am I paying a premium? Years ago their customer service slashed our rates because of our increased volume and even pc himself reached out to me about a technical matter (and the company was not small). Over…

Who are you looking at switching to? I'm also starting to evaluate alternatives to Stripe.

I don't want to drop any names here because we're in the exploratory phase, haven't even started negotiations with anyone yet. But there are alternatives that are quite a bit cheaper that offer fewer frills.

Humorously enough we needed a sales tax solution, and Stripe Tax is vastly outgunned by its competitors, possibly leading to the layoffs in its department. It is a significantly inferior product to Avalara, which is the leading product in the space.

Re: Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled

#64
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is complaining on HN necessary to get proper customer support?

Because otherwise you have no leverage. If you go through proper channels your request for help will sit rotting in a queue until someone decides to pick up the ticket. If you complain loudly and publicly in a popular forum, everyone’s opinion of the company will degrade the longer your cries go visibly unanswered, so it requires immediate attention. Your request gets elevated to critical.

As someone who worked as front-line support and turned into the authority who's asked to resolve complex cases, this is nonsense. They aren't playing Tetris ignoring the queue. It's more likely the front-line staff are overwhelmed and/or don't know how to cut through the corporate hoops/politics to find and deliver the fix, and/or too shy/embarrassed to admit ignorance and having to pass it to the higher-ups for someone who knows how to fix things. It's more likely going in circles because they want to resolve it within their levels without having to escalate it.

Re: Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled

#65
Every Stripe issue invites a flood of complaints, which is fine, but... try Better Business Bureau. They have a tracking process, they keep score, they assign a grade.

By the way, Stripe responses to BBB complaints are hilarious [1]. Most of the ones I read close with an identical snippet of text dismissing the claim as "baseless", even when they admit they made a mistake. It's astonishingly inept and says a lot about the attitude toward the customer.

[1] https://www.bbb.org/us/ca/san-francisco/profile/payment-proc...

Re: Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even I can see the humor in it. You are right! I hate to switch off Stripe, but the premium I'm paying is theoretically for better support and developer-friendly actions. I'm not getting that right now, so... why am I paying a premium? Years ago their customer service slashed our rates because of our increased volume and even pc himself reached out to me about a technical matter (and the company was not small). Over…

Anecdotally: I've been looking to get answers from Stripe, about fees-related questions that either make my proposed use viable or unviable, and I've received nothing but copied & pasted email replies, a week+ later (or not at all), which essentially ignore what I've asked. Incredibly frustrating. When I mention the experience to friends, they joke that I have Stockholm Syndrome; to want to continue pursuing them, de…

Yeah that's sad. I asked for a fee reduction 2 years into our relationship, and they said no because of XYZ but if we hit revenue targets ABC that they'd re-evaluate.

About a year later, we hit revenue targets ABC, I waited a month (just for systems to catch up) and emailed them. We had a good discussion about a rate cut and they knocked their fees down as they promised.

I emailed in 3-4 years after that and asked for a rate cut as our revenues had gone up by about 10x, and they said they could not, but provided explanations on why because of high international processing, high AMEX/Discover processing, etc. Totally cool, I understood that and appreciated the detailed email. Wasn't disappointed at all.

I tried back a year or so later when our revenues shot up but got the same message more or less, but still personalized. Again, I had to try, but also, not unhappy.

And since all of those excellent customer service responses - many of which did not go my way, which is not how I rate interactions - it's been awful. The corporate card team refuses to answer questions or even apologize for their insane limit cuts. They presumably are hiding behind bullshit KYC/AML justifications for their actions or protecting their algorithmic decisions in order to provide us zero actionable customer support with no personalization. It's embarrassing.

Re: Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled

#67

Switched to Paddle earlier this year for other reasons, glad I'm not affected by this. Paddle is not as pleasant to work with as Stripe from a dev perspective but it also handles so much more that what I need to integrate is tiny compared to Stripe.

Looks expensive, though. 5% + 50¢

Not really. It's an apples to oranges comparison.

For one thing Paddle is a merchant of record so it's more like "outsource your entire payment system including all the processing of different payment methods and the global tax admin". For a lot of businesses, particularly smaller ones with international sales, that is going to be an attractive option compared to services like Stripe even at this price point.

For another thing Stripe has introduced so many extras that bump up their cut now that some types of business will end up paying quite a bit more than the analogous headline rate. So even if it were an apples to apples comparison the difference on the bottom line still wouldn't be as wide as it might first appear for those merchants.

Re: Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any medium for such updates available to those who aren’t on Twitter?

$ stripe status with Stripe CLI ( https://stripe.com/docs/cli/status ) or RSS: https://status.stripe.com/current/atom.xml

Thank you

Re: Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled

#69
post #19

willing to bet that 99.999% uptime is just static text, because 5+ hours out of 2190 hours is not 99.999%

It is not static text. Calcuated automatically.

It's disingenuous to report "partial degradation" as "uptime" when some customers are unable to process any payments.

Re: Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks expensive, though. 5% + 50¢

It costs real money to provide real support. For those CTOs in the back: YOU NEED TO PAY REAL MONEY TO GET REAL SERVICE.

Except the extra cost here is on the wrong side of the equation: it's on the variable side.

So yes, CTO's should "pay real money to get real support," but that only makes sense if the costs don't scale with every dollar of revenue.

A 5% fee is basically impossible to pay for anything that's not software (90%+) margins. Ecommerce, for example, has about 5%-10% net margins. 2%, net, extra payment processing fees is huge.

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