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We had the same experience, unfortunately most of stripes "declined" charges are actually declined by the bank and stripe cannot, nor is willing to help you out

by sly010 10y ago

We had the same experience, unfortunately most of stripes "declined" charges are actually declined by the bank and stripe cannot, nor is willing to help you out. They are just a gateway. Once it happened on my own site with my own card, I called my bank's security team and asked what is the exact reason on their side and all they could tell me over the phone that they declined the transaction only because it was too "high risk" My theory (just a theory) is: A. banks fraud detection systems just don't like the way stripe is avoiding the whole merchant account game, so stipe just has a bad rep at banks B. stripe is so easy to set up and use, therefore various stripe websites has fraudulent transactions going on, so from the bank point of view just being a new merchant coming through stripe is automatically high risk The whole machine learning for fraud detection imho is very annoying from a merchant point of view, because there is no real way to fix it. We have had cards that got declined only the second-third month in a rent-to-own business and the only thing we can do is to ask the customer to call their bank. Hopefully once fraud detection happens at the stripe level instead of the bank level, banks will see less fraud coming from stripe and the overall decline rate will ... decline.

Silhouette 10y ago
Agreed on pretty much all of that. We too have wondered whether the ease of use that makes Stripe so attractive to a small business might also induce some sort of penalty in terms of fraud checks by other organisations. If that really is the case, presumably it leaves Stripe in a tough situation, but this seems like a responsible and hopefully effective step on their part. We see quite a lot of failures on the second month of a subscription, particularly for customers abroad (we're in the UK). We also tend to see these sort of failed charges happen in waves, with few problems for a while but then a sudden spike in declined transactions. That suggests at least one plausible explanation: the lack of CV2 after that first charge may be enough to tip something over the edge into "too suspicious" territory following some sort of update in the overall scoring scheme used by whoever is blocking the charge. We're looking into various potential ways to improve the situation, such as allowing more automated retries of failed charges over a longer period before we give up, and possibly advertising prices in our customers' local currencies. However, each of those has some potential downsides and obviously there is only so much you can do as the merchant anyway. If Radar can start to make Stripe, and by extension its merchants, a harder target for for fraudsters, maybe that will also move the needle a bit. A few times I think we've lost more subscribers in a month to failed card charges than everything else put together, including customers actively choosing to cancel and including failures via all other payment methods we accept, so it's definitely an issue worth exploring.

by sly010 10y ago

Silhouette 10y ago

Agreed on pretty much all of that. We too have wondered whether the ease of use that makes Stripe so attractive to a small business might also induce some sort of penalty in terms of fraud checks by other organisations. If that really is the case, presumably it leaves Stripe in a tough situation, but this seems like a responsible and hopefully effective step on their part. We see quite a lot of failures on the second month of a subscription, particularly for customers abroad (we're in the UK). We also tend to see these sort of failed charges happen in waves, with few problems for a while but then a sudden spike in declined transactions. That suggests at least one plausible explanation: the lack of CV2 after that first charge may be enough to tip something over the edge into "too suspicious" territory following some sort of update in the overall scoring scheme used by whoever is blocking the charge. We're looking into various potential ways to improve the situation, such as allowing more automated retries of failed charges over a longer period before we give up, and possibly advertising prices in our customers' local currencies. However, each of those has some potential downsides and obviously there is only so much you can do as the merchant anyway. If Radar can start to make Stripe, and by extension its merchants, a harder target for for fraudsters, maybe that will also move the needle a bit. A few times I think we've lost more subscribers in a month to failed card charges than everything else put together, including customers actively choosing to cancel and including failures via all other payment methods we accept, so it's definitely an issue worth exploring.