6 ms·

We run Shopify across a plurality of domains. Over the last 12 months, especially with the release of "Shopify Payments" (Stripe Connect) - they have become a l

by kweks 8y ago

We run Shopify across a plurality of domains. Over the last 12 months, especially with the release of "Shopify Payments" (Stripe Connect) - they have become a lot more opaque, greedy and dangerous for merchants. Anecdota: - Their "Shopify Payments" onboarding is highly shady. They onboard you _without_ performing KYC. Once you are committed to the platform, they perform KYC. They refuse to perform KYC before moving to their platform. - Once you commit, you can't go back to Stripe - they remove Stripe from the list of providers. In the past, support would reenable it upon request. Now they refuse. - We have a high volume site that migrated to Shopify Payments, after 4 years of Stripe without issue. Two weeks later, they sent an email stating we were not eligible Shopify Payments, refused to let us return to Stripe (would not reactivate it), and held the money collected for three months. - On another store, a competitor issued a trademark infringement email. Shopify pulled all products immediately, without communication - and refused to reinstate, despite letters from our legal team showing proof of capitulation from the accusatory party. The _platform_ is great. It out performs Magento, Presta, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, etc etc with its interface, product management, raw performance and core feature set. However, it is most definitely the PayPal of the eCommerce world: they can, have, and will happily kill accounts and clients based on their whims.

robertAngst 8y ago
Can anyone explain what the problem is? I feel like there is plenty of competition. Isnt the change as easy as signing up for a new website and changing some Form code? Serious question. (doing this with mailchimp was annoying, but not impossible)
- YeahSureWhyNot 8y ago
  another painful thing about shopify is that they will add some code at the end of the URL of your product pictures when exporting products like .jpeg?v=blabla which prevents them from being automatically imported into somewhere else
  - brianwawok 8y ago
    You can easily read all images out of the api.
  - nathanaldensr 8y ago
    This might be to prevent browser caching or otherwise provide versioning of images.
pw 8y ago
As someone who’s done a lot with Stripe Connect, I just want to clarify that there’s nothing inherently shady about onboarding users without performing KYC. I’m not sure if you meant to indicate it was (it sounds like Shopify might be doing it as part of a larger process that, as a whole, is shady). I think it’s an important point to make because one of the great benefits of Stripe Connect is being able to onboard users and let them start accepting payment without collecting any KYC information.
- kweks 8y ago
  I agree with you - there's nothing inherently shady with performing KYC at a later date. However, onboarding clients that are exisiting clients of Stripe, then claiming to not being able to process for the merchant, booting them off without allowing them to move back to Stripe, and withholding the payments taken - is completely shady.
  - pw 8y ago
    Yeah, definitely. I’d love to hear more about the high volume site that they rejected, though, if you’re willing and able to share. I’m just curious what went on in the backend because, in my experience, Stripe is good about not being overly zealous in shutting down Connect accounts. We’ve had accounts rejected for fraud or TOS violations (and they clearly were), but my sense is that had Stripe closed any accounts incorrectly, we very much could have interceded in the merchants behalf and got things corrected. On the KYC front, if there are difficulties, it’s usually just a matter of Stripe requiring a more rigorous form of verification (such as a copy of photo ID). We’ve never had a merchant to unable to completely KYC and lose their account. Of course, we operate at a much, much smaller scale than Shopify (and in a rather low risk vertical), so surely run into fewer problems and can handle them in a more personal manner. I wonder, though, how much of this could be Shopify’s inability or unwillingness to handle these edge cases that come up with Connect accounts rather than any malice on their part. Certainly pushing merchants to a Stripe Connect account and then not letting them go back to a regular Stripe is pretty bad, but, having been behind the scenes in a scenario ms like this, I could see how these could result from poor decision making and incomplete knowledge rather than malice. It’d be easy for someone to make the assumption that if a merchant as a stand-alone Stripe account, they’d obviously not run into any problems with a Connect accounts. Coupled with the fact that companies using Stripe Connect will tend to (not unreasonably) want to drive as much of the processing that happens on their platform into Stripe Connect, so that they can either begin to receiving volumes discounts on the processing or increase the discounts they already receive, which they can use to either make money on the processing or offer more competitive rates to their merchants.
skrebbel 8y ago
I had to look this up, sharing so it might help others: Apparently "KYC" means "know your customer", and it is some sort of vetting process done by payment providers.
- colechristensen 8y ago
  Basically identification and risk assessment to help identify and prevent fraud, money laundering, etc. These are government requirements which all sorts of finance business have to follow.
- ajcodez 8y ago
  Know Your Customer is performed at different levels for different requirements. You can KYC individuals or businesses. For individuals, there is a Level 2 check which verifies a government issued document and a selfie holding the document. There is also a Level 3 check that includes verifying a proof of residence document like a bank statement or utility bill. The end result is reasonable confidence the individual is a legal resident of a specific jurisdiction. There is also eKYC which is a credit history and other data sources check but you don’t actually process any documents. Anti Money Laundering is a ongoing process where you subscribe to a service that searches and monitors different lists for the name and birth year of all your customers. It raises a flag for a fuzzy match. The lists range from sanctions and terrorism which should immediately freeze the customer account, to adverse media such as financial crimes which is a judgement call depending on your service, to politically exposed persons or PEP which means to be cautious about transactions that could be improper use of public funds.
  - robertAngst 8y ago
    As long as an individuals payments dont exceed $10,000/yr, there is no reporting?
    - tomcam 8y ago
      Why on earth was this downvoted?
    - 8y ago
robryan 8y ago
This is very relevant in eCommerce as it is far easier to get on the wrong side of stripe terms (and it can be subjective) with selling physical products. It wouldn't surprise me if it they would have had an issue with the store under their terms on Stripe as well and it just happened to not come up when signing up to stripe. Shopify is probably best for direct to consumer stores where they have all the product specs and authorizations lined up in the event of any issue.
yuchi 8y ago
May I point you to our own competing platform? https://en.storeden.com https://en.storeden.com
- jimnotgym 8y ago
  Can you tell me a few things about it 1) Can it handle cross EU border VAT zero rating 2) Can I have multiple currencies? If so is this just a convertion from base or real individual price lists 3) Can I have multiple languages? So the whole store including the checkout could be in multiple languages?
- kweks 8y ago
  I'd be interested to see a back-end demo. team - infowise.aisa
  - YeahSureWhyNot 8y ago
    hey if you are USA based selling and shipping physical products you should consider CartSpark.com
- justinclift 8y ago
  Sounded interesting, but your team doesn't seem to be on the ball. :( The HTTPS certificate for one of your main websites (submitting bug issues), linked from your front page, expired last November. https://assistenza.storeden.com https://assistenza.storeden.com For a lot of things, some forgiveness is in order. But for an eCommerce place, it seems a bit much. :(
  - justinclift 8y ago
    And, 1 week later the certificate is still expired. Clearly people should avoid storeden.com.
amelius 8y ago
I think we have enough datapoints now to say with confidence that surrendering to a platform, any platform, is a very bad idea.
- thefounder 8y ago
  That's available for proprietary cloud services as well(i.e Google Datastore)
- johannes1234321 8y ago
  Surrendering might indeed be bad, that doesn't mean that using them consciously wasn't a beneficial thing. If I rent my office space I also have a notable lock-in and moving out has costs. Still it might be cheaper than building in my own and failing to scale later.
  - amelius 8y ago
    Joining a platform may be beneficial only on a short-term. And it is usually bad for the entire group of people/professionals that are involved. For example, by joining the App store you are supporting the platform, but through strength/growth of the platform you are creating a pressure for other developers to also join that platform. But in the end, you are stuck with 30% tax on your work, plus a market-regulator that you may not agree with and that can even become your competitor. And you are likely to become the helpless subject of stories like in this post. Therefore, yes, joining a platform can be beneficial. But it can be seen as a greedy, selfish action; and in the long run a very costly mistake.
ignoramous 8y ago
Surprising. Tobi Lutke, Shopify CEO, does use hacker news [0]. May be he reads this and elects to respond, like he's done before [1]. Given his profile, he doesn't come off as someone who'd make or approve of such decisions [2]. -- [0] xal [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10549279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10549279 [2] https://tobi.lutke.com/blogs/news/11280225-good-at-making-decisions https://tobi.lutke.com/blogs/news/11280225-good-at-making-de...
- kweks 8y ago
  I had emailed him directly, excusing myself to have escalated to his direct email, writing a balanced, polite email asking for assistance, or at least confirmation of position. Had no reply.
  - bufferoverflow 8y ago
    Well, he is in charge of this system. Why would he reply? He knows exactly what they do and how shady it is.
    - dang 8y ago
      That crosses into personal attack, which is not ok here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, you'll notice that the rules include Assume good faith.
      - maccio92 8y ago
        We can assume good faith, but when bad faith has been demonstrated we should not turn a blind eye
        dang 8y ago
        What people consider "demonstrated" depends greatly on how they feel about a thing. We're asking users to err on the side of assuming good faith. That's not easy, so if you're not making a strong conscious effort to do it, you're probably not following the guidelines. (I mean anybody, of course—not you personally.)
YeahSureWhyNot 8y ago
hey if you operate in US and sell and ship physical products then we maybe able to help. bonus: stripe is a default integrated payment system. checkout cartspark.com
chrsstrm 8y ago
FWIW, you used to be able to activate Stripe by setting the address of your store outside the US, turn Stripe on, then set your address back. Not sure if that still works though. Just pick a country where Shopify Payments isn’t offered.
burtonator 8y ago
One of the problems with capitalism is that it's a race to the bottom. If your competitor is doing something shady they're going to make more money. If it doesn't become an externality to them then it's profitable and more profits means that they can re-invest those to grow their business -faster than you can grow yours. So now you're torn... should you do this highly unethical thing or go out of business? Taxes are a good example. Say your Google and don't want to do the double-Irish jig to avoid paying US taxes. You want to pay your fair share. However Apple is now making BANK and they can use that money (at least in the future) for R&D and shipping new products. You're going to be more and more and more tempted to do these things because they're never any pushback. As an entrepreneur I WANT quality government regulation and oversight. I don't want to have to do this type of shady crap just because the market forces me to...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
Kagerjay 8y ago
Shopify payments was the sole reason I didn't use it for an industrial equipment e-store. Markups are low as it is, Shopify payments takes an extra .25% interchange, getting vendor and payment locked is just a high risk venture.
iask 8y ago
I’ve been trying for months to get Info on payment tokenization and keep getting the push around. And the rep keep suggesting I use one of their subscription app. Their UI is great, but too freaking restrictive.
- allanmacgregor 8y ago
  Shopify payments doesn't support Credit card vaulting aka tokenization; as well has some interesting restrictions like a fixed 7 day authorization expiration. Shopify is great if you are willing to conform to the Shopify way of doing things, if you have to go outside of that ... well then you are going to have a bad time.
martin_kivi 8y ago
Shameless plug but maybe https://www.shoperb.com https://www.shoperb.com may be interesting. I'm the founder of the company, if there's anything I can help with, just let me know. We're quite flexible when it comes to feature development and listen closely what our customers need. We work well with various credit card gateways, etc. We can do quite a bit of custom development as well based on your specific requirements.

by kweks 8y ago

robertAngst 8y ago

Can anyone explain what the problem is? I feel like there is plenty of competition. Isnt the change as easy as signing up for a new website and changing some Form code? Serious question. (doing this with mailchimp was annoying, but not impossible)

YeahSureWhyNot 8y ago
another painful thing about shopify is that they will add some code at the end of the URL of your product pictures when exporting products like .jpeg?v=blabla which prevents them from being automatically imported into somewhere else
- brianwawok 8y ago
  You can easily read all images out of the api.
- nathanaldensr 8y ago
  This might be to prevent browser caching or otherwise provide versioning of images.

pw 8y ago

As someone who’s done a lot with Stripe Connect, I just want to clarify that there’s nothing inherently shady about onboarding users without performing KYC. I’m not sure if you meant to indicate it was (it sounds like Shopify might be doing it as part of a larger process that, as a whole, is shady). I think it’s an important point to make because one of the great benefits of Stripe Connect is being able to onboard users and let them start accepting payment without collecting any KYC information.

kweks 8y ago
I agree with you - there's nothing inherently shady with performing KYC at a later date. However, onboarding clients that are exisiting clients of Stripe, then claiming to not being able to process for the merchant, booting them off without allowing them to move back to Stripe, and withholding the payments taken - is completely shady.
- pw 8y ago
  Yeah, definitely. I’d love to hear more about the high volume site that they rejected, though, if you’re willing and able to share. I’m just curious what went on in the backend because, in my experience, Stripe is good about not being overly zealous in shutting down Connect accounts. We’ve had accounts rejected for fraud or TOS violations (and they clearly were), but my sense is that had Stripe closed any accounts incorrectly, we very much could have interceded in the merchants behalf and got things corrected. On the KYC front, if there are difficulties, it’s usually just a matter of Stripe requiring a more rigorous form of verification (such as a copy of photo ID). We’ve never had a merchant to unable to completely KYC and lose their account. Of course, we operate at a much, much smaller scale than Shopify (and in a rather low risk vertical), so surely run into fewer problems and can handle them in a more personal manner. I wonder, though, how much of this could be Shopify’s inability or unwillingness to handle these edge cases that come up with Connect accounts rather than any malice on their part. Certainly pushing merchants to a Stripe Connect account and then not letting them go back to a regular Stripe is pretty bad, but, having been behind the scenes in a scenario ms like this, I could see how these could result from poor decision making and incomplete knowledge rather than malice. It’d be easy for someone to make the assumption that if a merchant as a stand-alone Stripe account, they’d obviously not run into any problems with a Connect accounts. Coupled with the fact that companies using Stripe Connect will tend to (not unreasonably) want to drive as much of the processing that happens on their platform into Stripe Connect, so that they can either begin to receiving volumes discounts on the processing or increase the discounts they already receive, which they can use to either make money on the processing or offer more competitive rates to their merchants.

skrebbel 8y ago

I had to look this up, sharing so it might help others: Apparently "KYC" means "know your customer", and it is some sort of vetting process done by payment providers.

colechristensen 8y ago
Basically identification and risk assessment to help identify and prevent fraud, money laundering, etc. These are government requirements which all sorts of finance business have to follow.
ajcodez 8y ago
Know Your Customer is performed at different levels for different requirements. You can KYC individuals or businesses. For individuals, there is a Level 2 check which verifies a government issued document and a selfie holding the document. There is also a Level 3 check that includes verifying a proof of residence document like a bank statement or utility bill. The end result is reasonable confidence the individual is a legal resident of a specific jurisdiction. There is also eKYC which is a credit history and other data sources check but you don’t actually process any documents. Anti Money Laundering is a ongoing process where you subscribe to a service that searches and monitors different lists for the name and birth year of all your customers. It raises a flag for a fuzzy match. The lists range from sanctions and terrorism which should immediately freeze the customer account, to adverse media such as financial crimes which is a judgement call depending on your service, to politically exposed persons or PEP which means to be cautious about transactions that could be improper use of public funds.
- robertAngst 8y ago
  As long as an individuals payments dont exceed $10,000/yr, there is no reporting?
  - tomcam 8y ago
    Why on earth was this downvoted?
  - 8y ago

robryan 8y ago

This is very relevant in eCommerce as it is far easier to get on the wrong side of stripe terms (and it can be subjective) with selling physical products. It wouldn't surprise me if it they would have had an issue with the store under their terms on Stripe as well and it just happened to not come up when signing up to stripe. Shopify is probably best for direct to consumer stores where they have all the product specs and authorizations lined up in the event of any issue.

yuchi 8y ago

May I point you to our own competing platform? https://en.storeden.com https://en.storeden.com

jimnotgym 8y ago
Can you tell me a few things about it 1) Can it handle cross EU border VAT zero rating 2) Can I have multiple currencies? If so is this just a convertion from base or real individual price lists 3) Can I have multiple languages? So the whole store including the checkout could be in multiple languages?
kweks 8y ago
I'd be interested to see a back-end demo. team - infowise.aisa
- YeahSureWhyNot 8y ago
  hey if you are USA based selling and shipping physical products you should consider CartSpark.com
justinclift 8y ago
Sounded interesting, but your team doesn't seem to be on the ball. :( The HTTPS certificate for one of your main websites (submitting bug issues), linked from your front page, expired last November. https://assistenza.storeden.com https://assistenza.storeden.com For a lot of things, some forgiveness is in order. But for an eCommerce place, it seems a bit much. :(
- justinclift 8y ago
  And, 1 week later the certificate is still expired. Clearly people should avoid storeden.com.

amelius 8y ago

I think we have enough datapoints now to say with confidence that surrendering to a platform, any platform, is a very bad idea.

thefounder 8y ago
That's available for proprietary cloud services as well(i.e Google Datastore)
johannes1234321 8y ago
Surrendering might indeed be bad, that doesn't mean that using them consciously wasn't a beneficial thing. If I rent my office space I also have a notable lock-in and moving out has costs. Still it might be cheaper than building in my own and failing to scale later.
- amelius 8y ago
  Joining a platform may be beneficial only on a short-term. And it is usually bad for the entire group of people/professionals that are involved. For example, by joining the App store you are supporting the platform, but through strength/growth of the platform you are creating a pressure for other developers to also join that platform. But in the end, you are stuck with 30% tax on your work, plus a market-regulator that you may not agree with and that can even become your competitor. And you are likely to become the helpless subject of stories like in this post. Therefore, yes, joining a platform can be beneficial. But it can be seen as a greedy, selfish action; and in the long run a very costly mistake.

ignoramous 8y ago

Surprising. Tobi Lutke, Shopify CEO, does use hacker news [0]. May be he reads this and elects to respond, like he's done before [1]. Given his profile, he doesn't come off as someone who'd make or approve of such decisions [2]. -- [0] xal [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10549279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10549279 [2] https://tobi.lutke.com/blogs/news/11280225-good-at-making-decisions https://tobi.lutke.com/blogs/news/11280225-good-at-making-de...

kweks 8y ago
I had emailed him directly, excusing myself to have escalated to his direct email, writing a balanced, polite email asking for assistance, or at least confirmation of position. Had no reply.
- bufferoverflow 8y ago
  Well, he is in charge of this system. Why would he reply? He knows exactly what they do and how shady it is.
  - dang 8y ago
    That crosses into personal attack, which is not ok here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, you'll notice that the rules include Assume good faith.
    - maccio92 8y ago
      We can assume good faith, but when bad faith has been demonstrated we should not turn a blind eye
      - dang 8y ago
        What people consider "demonstrated" depends greatly on how they feel about a thing. We're asking users to err on the side of assuming good faith. That's not easy, so if you're not making a strong conscious effort to do it, you're probably not following the guidelines. (I mean anybody, of course—not you personally.)

YeahSureWhyNot 8y ago

hey if you operate in US and sell and ship physical products then we maybe able to help. bonus: stripe is a default integrated payment system. checkout cartspark.com

chrsstrm 8y ago

FWIW, you used to be able to activate Stripe by setting the address of your store outside the US, turn Stripe on, then set your address back. Not sure if that still works though. Just pick a country where Shopify Payments isn’t offered.

burtonator 8y ago

One of the problems with capitalism is that it's a race to the bottom. If your competitor is doing something shady they're going to make more money. If it doesn't become an externality to them then it's profitable and more profits means that they can re-invest those to grow their business -faster than you can grow yours. So now you're torn... should you do this highly unethical thing or go out of business? Taxes are a good example. Say your Google and don't want to do the double-Irish jig to avoid paying US taxes. You want to pay your fair share. However Apple is now making BANK and they can use that money (at least in the future) for R&D and shipping new products. You're going to be more and more and more tempted to do these things because they're never any pushback. As an entrepreneur I WANT quality government regulation and oversight. I don't want to have to do this type of shady crap just because the market forces me to...

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

Kagerjay 8y ago

Shopify payments was the sole reason I didn't use it for an industrial equipment e-store. Markups are low as it is, Shopify payments takes an extra .25% interchange, getting vendor and payment locked is just a high risk venture.

iask 8y ago

I’ve been trying for months to get Info on payment tokenization and keep getting the push around. And the rep keep suggesting I use one of their subscription app. Their UI is great, but too freaking restrictive.

allanmacgregor 8y ago
Shopify payments doesn't support Credit card vaulting aka tokenization; as well has some interesting restrictions like a fixed 7 day authorization expiration. Shopify is great if you are willing to conform to the Shopify way of doing things, if you have to go outside of that ... well then you are going to have a bad time.

martin_kivi 8y ago

Shameless plug but maybe https://www.shoperb.com https://www.shoperb.com may be interesting. I'm the founder of the company, if there's anything I can help with, just let me know. We're quite flexible when it comes to feature development and listen closely what our customers need. We work well with various credit card gateways, etc. We can do quite a bit of custom development as well based on your specific requirements.