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Stripe is no longer a suitable payment processor

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Stripe is no longer a suitable payment processor

#71

Post by quelltext »

sturza wrote: post #68
smca wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I work at Stripe) I'd like Stripe to be available for as broad a set of users as possible. Just think about our high-level business model: we charge a fee per transaction for our services. Closing an account without cause does not make financial sense, so we don't do it. If we were solely optimized for profit then we'd ideally want to accept as many businesses' transactions as we could, right? So that leaves three r…

If you had to choose where to put resources between high volume enterprise and low volume SMBs, you’d choose the former.

Then Stripe would just pull an Adyen and only allow such businesses. They don't and support millions of happy and legitimate SMBs. Yes, they won't get white glove treatment but don't write off the fact that Stripe is and wants to be supporting SMBs.

Re: Stripe is no longer a suitable payment processor

#72

Post by AnthonyMouse »

poisonborz wrote: post #61

Don't want to defend them, but it must be bloody hard to be a large payment processor these days. I guess they don't disable paying customers (which, en masse, must be still significant revenue) out of sheer lousiness.

No, that's pretty much what they do. The problem is that you're a small business that doesn't make a ton of money, and they only make that, which is almost nothing, so if they even vaguely suspect you of anything they burn down your house just to be sure.

The solution to this would be something like account number portability, similar to phone number portability. You have an account with a payment processor, you have a dispute with them, you port your account to a different payment processor and your customers never know the difference. Which you could also do if a competitor offered better rates, which is why they typically don't offer this.

But if they weren't dicks they would. In general, but especially if they expect to be able to drop you without being accused of malice.

A company shouldn't be able to lock you in and then shut you down. One or the other, never both. And, of course, they have to be able to do the second one, so they should never be able to do the first one.

Re: Stripe is no longer a suitable payment processor

#73

Post by smca »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #72
poisonborz wrote: post #61

Don't want to defend them, but it must be bloody hard to be a large payment processor these days. I guess they don't disable paying customers (which, en masse, must be still significant revenue) out of sheer lousiness.

No, that's pretty much what they do. The problem is that you're a small business that doesn't make a ton of money, and they only make that , which is almost nothing, so if they even vaguely suspect you of anything they burn down your house just to be sure. The solution to this would be something like account number portability, similar to phone number portability. You have an account with a payment processor, you hav…

Someone asked this recently. You can move your Stripe data to/from any PCI DSS level 1-compliant provider, so what you're saying isn't accurate.

To Stripe: https://stripe.com/docs/payments/account/data-migrations/pan...

From Stripe: https://stripe.com/docs/payments/account/data-migrations/pan...

Re: Stripe is no longer a suitable payment processor

#75

Post by wilhil »

Stripe is a nightmare and I found support to be awful and not know their own product.

We are a UK company but now have clients worldwide and worldwide bank accounts (thanks to Wise).

So many people in the US can't pay via ACH Transfer (we can't do debit without a US entity... looking in to options and setting up a LLC now), so, we need to be able to accept credit card.

I thought I had a nice workaround by having USD to my USD account and only paying standard (high) fees, but, they now charge me a surcharge for this despite no Forex fees needed, and worse, the fees always link to the wrong transactions so I can't even reconcile properly.

On top of this, they force convert my CAD to GBP despite having a CAD bank account, and charge me so many fees on top.

It's the only option I've found as of now, but, I'm far far from being a fan.

Re: Stripe is no longer a suitable payment processor

#76

Post by AnthonyMouse »

anon373839 wrote: post #6
EGreg wrote: post #4

What is the alternative to these large corporations? I will try to say it again… Web3. Easy to integrate as an option, start accepting payments worldwid, and you can never get deplatformed and your funds won’t be frozen. Why not? Over and over I see HN complain about enshittification of the latest large platform, but also somehow many people knee-jerk downvote anything about the decentralized alternatives because the…

I think the issue would be that you need to offer payment methods that your customers trust and will use. Does Web3 satisfy that need?

It's pretty obvious that the average customer doesn't have any cryptocurrency to pay with, so the onboarding system they would use to begin with would be some company that charges their credit card or debits their bank account and then converts it to cryptocurrency to transfer to you.

Which they wouldn't have any reason to trust any less than they do PayPal or Stripe, in the sense of not debiting their account when they didn't authorize it.

So what you need is a federated system in which the customer can choose whichever of those providers they want to use and that doesn't matter to the seller who can receives transfers from any company that customer paid for some cryptocurrency. The customer can use whoever they trust.

Now, maybe that doesn't have a good UX yet, but it could.

Re: Stripe is no longer a suitable payment processor

#77

Post by AnthonyMouse »

smca wrote: post #73
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's pretty much what they do. The problem is that you're a small business that doesn't make a ton of money, and they only make that , which is almost nothing, so if they even vaguely suspect you of anything they burn down your house just to be sure. The solution to this would be something like account number portability, similar to phone number portability. You have an account with a payment processor, you hav…

Someone asked this recently. You can move your Stripe data to/from any PCI DSS level 1-compliant provider, so what you're saying isn't accurate. To Stripe: https://stripe.com/docs/payments/account/data-migrations/pan... From Stripe: https://stripe.com/docs/payments/account/data-migrations/pan...

That's actually useful.

Can you do that even when your account is locked? How many other companies can you transfer the data to and which are they?

Re: Stripe is no longer a suitable payment processor

#79

Post by friendzis »

smca wrote: post #70
sturza wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had to choose where to put resources between high volume enterprise and low volume SMBs, you’d choose the former.

Why would we not want "low volume" SMBs? Many of the SMBs on our platform grow to be much larger businesses. Ignoring a massive sector of businesses who might one day be the next "big thing" would be foolish for one thing and an unwise financial decision for another. That's why you can sign up as a small business on stripe.com today whereas on other platforms you need to talk to their sales team (and be generating se…

> Why would we not want "low volume" SMBs?

Because your costs are inversely proportional to business size.

Re: Stripe is no longer a suitable payment processor

#80

Post by sturza »

smca wrote: post #70
sturza wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had to choose where to put resources between high volume enterprise and low volume SMBs, you’d choose the former.

Why would we not want "low volume" SMBs? Many of the SMBs on our platform grow to be much larger businesses. Ignoring a massive sector of businesses who might one day be the next "big thing" would be foolish for one thing and an unwise financial decision for another. That's why you can sign up as a small business on stripe.com today whereas on other platforms you need to talk to their sales team (and be generating se…

> Ignoring a massive sector of businesses who might one day be the next "big thing" would be foolish for one thing and an unwise financial decision for another.

So Stripe would sacrifice enterprise high volume customers because they hope/speculate that low volume SMBs will one day be big, if they'd need to choose where to direct resources? I highly doubt it.

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