Tell HN: Stripe brought my business to a dead stop

I was an early adopter of internet commerce but I got my fingers burned several times when companies made unilateral decisions against me and provided no simple means of contact between me and them.

I now refuse to use any super-duper payment system that does not have my bank as a buffer between me and them.

Call me a Luddite if you like. But I feel happier.

I've extensively used both Merchant e-Solutions and Authorize.Net, both of which have been around a lot longer than Stripe, and not had trouble getting support from either. (Also, Authorize.Net is actually owned by Visa, which is certainly not small).

That said, people should remember that there are two sides to every story and account for the fact that the other side isn't available here. That makes me think there's more going on than meets the eye, especially since the financial space is regulated and there may be legal or institutional constraints on what they're able to say. If the issue were simply a failure to do good service, they would be smart enough to say so and correct it; it would be in their interest to do so and that's what they've done in the past. So there's probably additional complexity and we don't know what it is.

For a few years I worked on a startup that aimed to address fraud management in e-commerce from a quantitative risk modelling perspective. And when Stripe released radar 2.0, I went through their docs. I was impressed by Stripe's marketing (docs) and UI—they're knowingly good for that, but I was much less impressed by radar 2.0's feature-set and product. The biggest issue for me was their "one-size-fit-all" approach, because that just does NOT work in what I've seen, i.e., both billion- and million-euro businesses.

From a risk management perspective, a 2-7% gross margin e-commerce manages risk totally differently than a 50%+ gross margin e-commerce. For one, the false negative (i.e., a fraud gets through) is super-expensive. For the other, a false positive (i.e., a real client is stopped) is super expensive. And I did not see anywhere in their docs how they integrated the cost-imbalance of the risk for each of their client (you), and event less for each of their client's clients! It's possible to do, but it's hard.

Of course, like any fraud prevention system, radar 2.0 allows clients to add rules and lists to customise their logic, but these mechanisms are difficult to setup when you start processing payments, because you don't have yet any payment history, as well as when your e-commerce gains in velocity and complexity, because you don't necessarily have the in-house resources or skills to keep your rules and lists up to date and well maintained.

And in the lucky case that one just feels happy with Stripe's radar 2.0 system, then how do you know that you're not loosing customers? Having no risk of chargeback is very easy, just don't accept any payment and you've a risk-free e-commerce! In my experience, we increased sales by 7% (a few tenths of millions of euros) by just re-parameterising how fraud was managed. I don't see anywhere anywhere in the docs why and how I should trust radar 2.0 for the specifics of e-commerce A, B, and C. One-size-fit all just doesn't work.

As a former startup founder in that area, I still see we're a long way towards personalised risk management in e-commerce services, that would help owners throughout the different stages of their e-commerce, i.e., idea, proof of concept, scaling, growth... sounds similar?

Best of luck :-)

Is your credit good? That's sometimes another flag that can come up.