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(I'm one of Stripe's cofounders.) Thanks for the candid feedback. A few quick thoughts -- - This is not a new policy change -- it's been our pricing for all n

by pc 7y ago

(I'm one of Stripe's cofounders.) Thanks for the candid feedback. A few quick thoughts -- - This is not a new policy change -- it's been our pricing for all new users since 2017. (The news is that we're now applying this pricing to Stripe's older users, in part as a response to some price increases that the card networks are making.) - Our policy on refunds is pretty much the same as Braintree's. - We've added a lot of new functionality to Stripe since we launched in 2011. (The Stripe that launched back then did not support any non-card payment methods, non-USD currencies, non-US users, etc.) The vast majority of new features come with no new fees -- the Stripe package just gets better. For improvements that don't represent discrete new features, the changes can be non-obvious. Our goal is to quietly optimize things so that Stripe integrations continually get better without your code having to change. For example, Radar is far more effective at preventing fraud and chargebacks than it's ever been. Or, last year, we built an ML engine to automatically optimize the bitfields of card network requests. This has already generated an incremental $1 billion of revenue for Stripe users (with no additional cost). - Testing production flows with fake numbers is tricky. (How should these charges show up for reporting purposes? If we exclude them, that introduces another discrepancy. If we include them, that means you have to then handle the downstream cash discrepancy.) It's not an intrinsically unsolvable problem but we have not yet seen a clean solution that we feel good about. As other commenters point out, making sure they're sufficiently secure is also a challenge. - While we're proud of our books, I can assure you that the ratio of people working on improving our payments stack to publishing is about 1000:1. All that said, it's helpful to hear how it seems from your standpoint. We're acutely aware of how much Stripe has yet to do/build. We'll continue to work hard, and I hope we can support your business for many years to come.

ValentineC 7y ago
> Our policy on refunds is pretty much the same as Braintree's. I'm seeing something different on (my local) Braintree site [1][2]: > All processing fees, except the per transaction fee, are returned for full refunds. For partial refunds, all processing fees are returned at a prorated amount, but the transaction fee is not returned. [1] https://www.braintreepayments.com/sg/braintree-pricing https://www.braintreepayments.com/sg/braintree-pricing [2] Looks like the US one has the same policy as Stripe: https://www.braintreepayments.com/braintree-pricing?locale=us https://www.braintreepayments.com/braintree-pricing?locale=u...
- pc 7y ago
  Yes, per [2], our US refund policies are roughly the same.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
totalZero 7y ago
If I may make a sincere criticism, as a person who knows nothing about either side of this conversation.... We should all delete "I'm sorry you feel that way" from our mental phrasebooks. It is a phrase that always falls flat, comes across as potentially sarcastic, and is the textbook definition of a non-apology apology. If you want to clarify something, go for it. If you don't want to apologize, don't feel obligated to do so. But please, for your own benefit, steer clear of this no-good phrase.
- pc 7y ago
  You're right! (Though I am.) I edited the comment.
  - foo_llc 7y ago
    I guess your comment was not... pc enough.
- echelon 7y ago
  To be fair, this is the CEO personally reaching out. I think that's beyond awesome.
  - jader201 7y ago
    While it’s nice to hear more context in response to the OP’s criticisms, I’m not sure I would consider a response mostly defending the criticisms “beyond awesome”. Most tech startups know the influence HN has, and to respond to a top post with a mostly defensive stance (vs. the OP points actually having an impact on the decisions being made) is a smart move on the part of the CEO (I would probably do the same thing). Just saying I wouldn’t have used the words “beyond awesome”.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - ubu7737 7y ago
    Are you starstruck? Is that what you're trying to say?
_jal 7y ago
> Testing production flows with fake numbers is tricky And yet Authorize.net and many others manage it without drama. I know of one account you did not land because of this.
jfim 7y ago
> we built an ML engine to automatically optimize the bitfields of card network requests For someone who's not in the payment industry, could you elaborate on what this actually means?
- adrr 7y ago
  There’s a few fields you can set meta data around the transaction. Eg: it’s a recurring charge Every processor optimizes this though.
  - dhimes 7y ago
    I wonder how it added $1B of revenue to Stripe's customers.
burningion 7y ago
A few months back, I was hit with an attack from a spammer, who managed to place a few hundred orders through my Stripe checkout. It seems they were attempting to place thousands of orders, and looking for functional credit card information. When I reached out to support, they acknowledged that this was a type of attack, and I needed to manually go back and unapprove all of these purchases coming from a single IP address, that wasn't being stopped by Stripe. Would I still need to pay to do all those fraudulent charge backs? If so, that single attack would have cost me hundreds of dollars out of pocket.
- patio11 7y ago
  I'm sorry that happened to you. Could you email me at this handle at stripe.com? I want to look into why we didn’t auto-detect that surge in suspicious transactions. We’re here to support startups. If you ever have a unique circumstance, write us; we’ll try to be reasonable, in the same fashion that your hosting provider will try to be reasonable if an engineer e.g. fumble fingers a deploy and briefly turns on a larger fleet of servers than they intended. (It's worth noting, for precision's sake, that a refund is not a chargeback. Chargebacks are when the person who actually owns the credit card calls the bank to complain; they're strictly worse for all parties than simple refunds.)
  - abduhl 7y ago
    While this is an interesting response, it strictly does not the answer the poster’s question. Would they be liable for the fees for an attack like this?
    - patio11 7y ago
      It's difficult for me to predict our response in every possible hypothetical circumstance, so I'm promising what I feel we can actually promise: a human who cares about your success will review the circumstances and make a judgment call.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
joering2 7y ago
Yeah extremely hard to come by with solution right? Visa test / approve / record account: 48 XXXX 01 Visa test / approve / donot record: 48 XXXX 02 Visa test / donot approve / record account 48 XXXX 03 Visa test / donot approve / donot record 48 XXXX 04 Hard to let it to client to decide how to test...
- verletx64 7y ago
  But then does the developer now need to track this list of production test cards and make sure the application doesn’t enact some other logic based on the test purchase? I mean really, you can get 99.9% of the way there with the test cards in the sandbox, and then give the thing a smoke test in production when you’re ready.
austinkhale 7y ago
We recently made the decision as a SaaS company to switch from a subscription management platform I won't name to Stripe. The process has not been without a couple bumps along the way, but frankly working with Stripe is similar to that scene from Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers when Gandalf tells Theoden to "Breathe the free air again, my friend." Please continue to do what you're doing in this space. Payments are such a complex beast and it's refreshing to work with a company that works so hard to abstract that complexity.
- pc 7y ago
  Thank you! A lot still to do.
- btmorex 7y ago
  My personal experience is that all subscription management platforms fall over when you're doing enterprise SaaS. At a certain level (because literally your most valuable customers insist), you have to deal with credit cards, ACH, wire transfers, and checks. On top of that: custom plans, all sorts of weird line items and discounts, prepays, etc. And then you usually want reporting in multiple different formats (e.g. for the accountants/IRS, for company leadership)... it gets messy really quickly and I haven't seen platform that can handle the mess. Probably a startup in there, but not one I'd like to build.
  - bradgessler 7y ago
    I’m curious if any other HNers know of solutions out there that solve these problems.
    - ativzzz 7y ago
      In house solutions. Once a company becomes large enough where paying a company like Stripe's fees becomes larger than hiring enough people to create and maintain an internal billing system, then you do it yourself. This is something that companies that are near public company size do since the amount of work required to meet payment regulations alone, not to mention all of the infrastructure to support things like subscriptions is staggering. This is why there aren't many solutions to this problem. It's a very difficult problem.
tomc1985 7y ago
> we built an ML engine to automatically optimize the bitfields of card network requests. Uh, what?
- pc 7y ago
  Card network requests are comprised of fairly complex ISO 8583 messages. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8583. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8583.) We now have enough data across Stripe to implement an ML engine to optimize these requests on a per-issuing bank basis. As mentioned in original comment, this helps collect a lot more "free" revenue for our users.
  - dmlittle 7y ago
    For the curious here's the link without the period at the end for convenience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8583 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8583
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - BrandonMarc 7y ago
    What is meant by "free" revenue? I'm wondering how the one leads to the other. Does this mean, lower processing fee/less need to increase processing fees?
    - jccooper 7y ago
      It means fewer rejected transactions.
    - patio11 7y ago
      Businesses invest in product development and marketing to bring a customer to them. The customer is convinced of the value of the thing they want to buy and puts in their credit card number. Sometimes it doesn't work, for example because a poorly understood interaction of systems at their bank decides the charge is likely fraudulent. (Ask me about how a particular US bank has caught 17 of the last 0 times a fraudster in Japan used my credit card to purchase software.) Some percentage of these customers retry, perhaps with another card, and eventually succeed in buying the thing they want to buy. Some don't, and the business loses the revenue that a customer was already happy to give them. Improving authorization rates (the industry jargon for that) recovers that revenue, for ~free (your product/advertising/etc spend to attract the customer is the same whether they successfully complete the purchase or not).
inferiorhuman 7y ago
This is not a new policy change -- it's been our pricing for all new users since 2017. (The news is that we're now applying this pricing to Stripe's older users, in part as a response to some price increases that the card networks are making.) A phrase that comes to mind is: two wrongs don't make a right.
- hellotomyrars 7y ago
  Reminds me when my Charter/Spectrum told me that even though I cancelled my service 2 days into the billing period, that I paid for a fixed term of service per billing period and they would not give me a prorated refund. Escalating up the chain I got to the supervisor who told me that it was always their policy but they were just now enforcing it. Oh okay. Sure. That makes it all okay. /s
commoner 7y ago
This trend is awful for businesses. In October 2019, PayPal (which owns Braintree) also started to retain their 2.9% + $0.30 processing fee from refunded transactions. Stripe is now in the same class as PayPal. https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/20/20876570/paypal-refund-fee-policy-change-sellers-controversy https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/20/20876570/paypal-refund-fe... Square still refunds processing fees to merchants for refunded transactions. They have the same fee (2.9% + $0.30) for online transactions, and a lower fee (2.6% + $0.10) for in-person transactions with their card reader. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5060-refund-overview https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5060-refund-overview https://squareup.com/us/en/pricing https://squareup.com/us/en/pricing
- belzebalex 7y ago
  * Whistling * Crypto's coming!
  - threeseed 7y ago
    Crypto is like Linux on the Desktop i.e. about as popular as it's always going to be. And the reason is that most people simply don't hate the status quo.
  - LunaSea 7y ago
    10min long transactions, yay!
    - lostmsu 7y ago
      Does not seem like a major problem for an online business (e.g. movie ticket sales, Amazon, App Store, etc). There's also always an option to take the first confirmation (~24sec in Ethereum) as a sufficient proof for small transactions.
ancorevard 7y ago
Love your work!
tomcam 7y ago
If you were a customer of Stripe, would you feel you were being treated well by this policy after you'd already been dealt a refund?
- sovande 7y ago
  No, this is infuriating, but we must not forget that they “built an ML engine to automatically optimize bla bla bla.” But really, pretense should be off. Stripe is nothing more than a PayPal clone. Even the refund policy is now perfectly cloned. Someone here said that the only way our discontent can be heard is for us to switch between platforms regularly. Right now, PayPal does not look so bad. Their API and documentation has also become pretty good. Of course, the better thing would be to just get a merchant account and drop all these middleman leeches. Apropos, don’t get me started on the AppStore were we only pay 30% for the privilege
  - thowfaraway 7y ago
    PayPal does not look so bad. Their API and documentation has also become pretty good. Documentation has gone form terrible to bad. API has gone from always terrible to appearing OK but will periodically destroy your happiness and productivity for a week. I would never voluntarily work with PayPal tech.
    - sovande 7y ago
      > I would never voluntarily work with PayPal tech. Really, for your company's sake I hope what matters is not what you like, but that your company has a payment solution that does not stop working when Stripe freezes your account. Yeah, Stripe is not an iota better than PayPal when it comes to freezing accounts. The only sane thing to do is to have a backend system that at minimum can use both PayPal and Stripe. With such a system it should be easy to change between PayPal and Stripe and I suggest that we all shutdown the Stripe part to show our discontent.
adrr 7y ago
The question you can answer about this change: Does stripe get interchangeable refunded from the card networks/banks on a refunded transaction? Also any of the big processors you can negotiate the refund of interchange just like you can negotiate interchange plus pricing instead of blended which I assume stripe even offers to big merchants like Shopify. I do wonder if Shopify drops stripe since the change has pissed off all their $100mm+ merchants and they may lose a few. There isn’t a long term contract in place just a 6 month notice to quit.
slivanes 7y ago
Does this keeping of fee also apply to voided non-captured payments? When PayPal pulled this change (yes, imo this is a scummy thing to do to merchants), I changed my PayPal flow only to authorize prior to doing the charge so that this refund fee could be avoided.
floatingatoll 7y ago
Is there a Stripe permalink (blog, tweet, etc.) from back in 2017 that describes this change back when it was announced? And/or for this year’s change, that drops the exclusion?
mstachowiak 7y ago
Thanks for replying on this thread, PC. I'm curious to get your take on how this plays out for customers with large average transaction values ($500+)? Stripe's cost to process and refund a payment, while not zero, is generally flat (card networks refund interchange fees, Stripe only has to cover the minimal cost of running the software to process the transaction, which is the same for all transaction sizes). Shouldn't the retained fees be flat and not a percentage?
rladd 7y ago
I was hit by this charge too, when doing some test purchases. Support said "use test mode for that", but test mode is NOT adequate to fully test a live production system. The keys are different, the card numbers are different... it should work the same but may not. With this policy change, there's no way to test a live production system without paying Stripe all the money it would have gotten if the charge were real. And that's just a minor case. What happens if a huge fraudulent charge is made and we undo it before shipping product? We potentially get hit with huge fees, for no particular reason: Stripe doesn't have to pay those fees to the processor if there's a refund (Stripe cofounder, please correct me if I'm wrong). That being the case, this is pure gouging and nothing else. And gouging because others gouge is not a good reason or excuse. Be better, don't stoop to their level.
kkarpkkarp 7y ago
> I can assure you that the ratio of people working on improving our payments stack to publishing is about 1000:1. @pc, I just checked that Stripe has about 1800 employees. Could I ask why so many? :) I wouldn't expect such a big number for the company providing one (?) product/service.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
ThePhysicist 7y ago
Slightly amusing story about “testing” payment flows in production: In Germany we have payment providers like Sofortüberweisung that ask you for your online banking credentials and then access your online banking via browser orchestration to initiate a transfer (I know it’s an utterly horrible idea from a privacy and security point of view). What they didn’t know initially was that some banks provide test accounts to customers where you can simulate transfers without transferring any money, and where you can simply enter your desired bank account balance (now that would be a killer feature for real online banking). Some people figured this out and used those fake accounts to make fraudulent orders. So if you offer such testing card numbers you should make sure your customers need a specific workflow to handle them (e.g. by returning a special error response code that can be distinguished from a normal error).
- whatsmyusername 7y ago
  Plaid works the same way. The tech is hilariously terrible and the best option currently.
temptemptemp111 7y ago
What would you recommend for a Stripe-backed SMB who has to turn away dozens of users per month because they only have some kind of "bank card" (which is normal in many European countries now). This business doesn't currently have the budget to implement support for all of these card types (Stripe UK does have support for most of them, it seems).
interpipes 7y ago
So in truth, what I'm hearing is "You should have noticed in 2017 when we started this process to begin with" (would that have helped, complaining at the time?) "We're confident we're not at a competitive disadvantage by doing this" "We developed our product " (to remain competitive) " and had to add a bunch of stuff that people expect card processing services to do " (more than one currency) " and some stuff many customers won't care about being delivered by a card processing service " (things other than cards) " and rather than charge the appropriate fees to the appropriate customers at point of use we are instead funding this progress by penalising customers who are already in the loss-making situation of having to make a refund"

by pc 7y ago

ValentineC 7y ago

> Our policy on refunds is pretty much the same as Braintree's. I'm seeing something different on (my local) Braintree site [1][2]: > All processing fees, except the per transaction fee, are returned for full refunds. For partial refunds, all processing fees are returned at a prorated amount, but the transaction fee is not returned. [1] https://www.braintreepayments.com/sg/braintree-pricing https://www.braintreepayments.com/sg/braintree-pricing [2] Looks like the US one has the same policy as Stripe: https://www.braintreepayments.com/braintree-pricing?locale=us https://www.braintreepayments.com/braintree-pricing?locale=u...

pc 7y ago
Yes, per [2], our US refund policies are roughly the same.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

totalZero 7y ago

If I may make a sincere criticism, as a person who knows nothing about either side of this conversation.... We should all delete "I'm sorry you feel that way" from our mental phrasebooks. It is a phrase that always falls flat, comes across as potentially sarcastic, and is the textbook definition of a non-apology apology. If you want to clarify something, go for it. If you don't want to apologize, don't feel obligated to do so. But please, for your own benefit, steer clear of this no-good phrase.

pc 7y ago
You're right! (Though I am.) I edited the comment.
- foo_llc 7y ago
  I guess your comment was not... pc enough.
echelon 7y ago
To be fair, this is the CEO personally reaching out. I think that's beyond awesome.
- jader201 7y ago
  While it’s nice to hear more context in response to the OP’s criticisms, I’m not sure I would consider a response mostly defending the criticisms “beyond awesome”. Most tech startups know the influence HN has, and to respond to a top post with a mostly defensive stance (vs. the OP points actually having an impact on the decisions being made) is a smart move on the part of the CEO (I would probably do the same thing). Just saying I wouldn’t have used the words “beyond awesome”.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- ubu7737 7y ago
  Are you starstruck? Is that what you're trying to say?

_jal 7y ago

> Testing production flows with fake numbers is tricky And yet Authorize.net and many others manage it without drama. I know of one account you did not land because of this.

jfim 7y ago

> we built an ML engine to automatically optimize the bitfields of card network requests For someone who's not in the payment industry, could you elaborate on what this actually means?

adrr 7y ago
There’s a few fields you can set meta data around the transaction. Eg: it’s a recurring charge Every processor optimizes this though.
- dhimes 7y ago
  I wonder how it added $1B of revenue to Stripe's customers.

burningion 7y ago

A few months back, I was hit with an attack from a spammer, who managed to place a few hundred orders through my Stripe checkout. It seems they were attempting to place thousands of orders, and looking for functional credit card information. When I reached out to support, they acknowledged that this was a type of attack, and I needed to manually go back and unapprove all of these purchases coming from a single IP address, that wasn't being stopped by Stripe. Would I still need to pay to do all those fraudulent charge backs? If so, that single attack would have cost me hundreds of dollars out of pocket.

patio11 7y ago
I'm sorry that happened to you. Could you email me at this handle at stripe.com? I want to look into why we didn’t auto-detect that surge in suspicious transactions. We’re here to support startups. If you ever have a unique circumstance, write us; we’ll try to be reasonable, in the same fashion that your hosting provider will try to be reasonable if an engineer e.g. fumble fingers a deploy and briefly turns on a larger fleet of servers than they intended. (It's worth noting, for precision's sake, that a refund is not a chargeback. Chargebacks are when the person who actually owns the credit card calls the bank to complain; they're strictly worse for all parties than simple refunds.)
- abduhl 7y ago
  While this is an interesting response, it strictly does not the answer the poster’s question. Would they be liable for the fees for an attack like this?
  - patio11 7y ago
    It's difficult for me to predict our response in every possible hypothetical circumstance, so I'm promising what I feel we can actually promise: a human who cares about your success will review the circumstances and make a judgment call.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]

joering2 7y ago

Yeah extremely hard to come by with solution right? Visa test / approve / record account: 48 XXXX 01 Visa test / approve / donot record: 48 XXXX 02 Visa test / donot approve / record account 48 XXXX 03 Visa test / donot approve / donot record 48 XXXX 04 Hard to let it to client to decide how to test...

verletx64 7y ago
But then does the developer now need to track this list of production test cards and make sure the application doesn’t enact some other logic based on the test purchase? I mean really, you can get 99.9% of the way there with the test cards in the sandbox, and then give the thing a smoke test in production when you’re ready.

austinkhale 7y ago

We recently made the decision as a SaaS company to switch from a subscription management platform I won't name to Stripe. The process has not been without a couple bumps along the way, but frankly working with Stripe is similar to that scene from Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers when Gandalf tells Theoden to "Breathe the free air again, my friend." Please continue to do what you're doing in this space. Payments are such a complex beast and it's refreshing to work with a company that works so hard to abstract that complexity.

pc 7y ago
Thank you! A lot still to do.
btmorex 7y ago
My personal experience is that all subscription management platforms fall over when you're doing enterprise SaaS. At a certain level (because literally your most valuable customers insist), you have to deal with credit cards, ACH, wire transfers, and checks. On top of that: custom plans, all sorts of weird line items and discounts, prepays, etc. And then you usually want reporting in multiple different formats (e.g. for the accountants/IRS, for company leadership)... it gets messy really quickly and I haven't seen platform that can handle the mess. Probably a startup in there, but not one I'd like to build.
- bradgessler 7y ago
  I’m curious if any other HNers know of solutions out there that solve these problems.
  - ativzzz 7y ago
    In house solutions. Once a company becomes large enough where paying a company like Stripe's fees becomes larger than hiring enough people to create and maintain an internal billing system, then you do it yourself. This is something that companies that are near public company size do since the amount of work required to meet payment regulations alone, not to mention all of the infrastructure to support things like subscriptions is staggering. This is why there aren't many solutions to this problem. It's a very difficult problem.

tomc1985 7y ago

> we built an ML engine to automatically optimize the bitfields of card network requests. Uh, what?

pc 7y ago
Card network requests are comprised of fairly complex ISO 8583 messages. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8583. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8583.) We now have enough data across Stripe to implement an ML engine to optimize these requests on a per-issuing bank basis. As mentioned in original comment, this helps collect a lot more "free" revenue for our users.
- dmlittle 7y ago
  For the curious here's the link without the period at the end for convenience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8583 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8583
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- BrandonMarc 7y ago
  What is meant by "free" revenue? I'm wondering how the one leads to the other. Does this mean, lower processing fee/less need to increase processing fees?
  - jccooper 7y ago
    It means fewer rejected transactions.
  - patio11 7y ago
    Businesses invest in product development and marketing to bring a customer to them. The customer is convinced of the value of the thing they want to buy and puts in their credit card number. Sometimes it doesn't work, for example because a poorly understood interaction of systems at their bank decides the charge is likely fraudulent. (Ask me about how a particular US bank has caught 17 of the last 0 times a fraudster in Japan used my credit card to purchase software.) Some percentage of these customers retry, perhaps with another card, and eventually succeed in buying the thing they want to buy. Some don't, and the business loses the revenue that a customer was already happy to give them. Improving authorization rates (the industry jargon for that) recovers that revenue, for ~free (your product/advertising/etc spend to attract the customer is the same whether they successfully complete the purchase or not).

inferiorhuman 7y ago

This is not a new policy change -- it's been our pricing for all new users since 2017. (The news is that we're now applying this pricing to Stripe's older users, in part as a response to some price increases that the card networks are making.) A phrase that comes to mind is: two wrongs don't make a right.

hellotomyrars 7y ago
Reminds me when my Charter/Spectrum told me that even though I cancelled my service 2 days into the billing period, that I paid for a fixed term of service per billing period and they would not give me a prorated refund. Escalating up the chain I got to the supervisor who told me that it was always their policy but they were just now enforcing it. Oh okay. Sure. That makes it all okay. /s

commoner 7y ago

This trend is awful for businesses. In October 2019, PayPal (which owns Braintree) also started to retain their 2.9% + $0.30 processing fee from refunded transactions. Stripe is now in the same class as PayPal. https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/20/20876570/paypal-refund-fee-policy-change-sellers-controversy https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/20/20876570/paypal-refund-fe... Square still refunds processing fees to merchants for refunded transactions. They have the same fee (2.9% + $0.30) for online transactions, and a lower fee (2.6% + $0.10) for in-person transactions with their card reader. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5060-refund-overview https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5060-refund-overview https://squareup.com/us/en/pricing https://squareup.com/us/en/pricing

belzebalex 7y ago
* Whistling * Crypto's coming!
- threeseed 7y ago
  Crypto is like Linux on the Desktop i.e. about as popular as it's always going to be. And the reason is that most people simply don't hate the status quo.
- LunaSea 7y ago
  10min long transactions, yay!
  - lostmsu 7y ago
    Does not seem like a major problem for an online business (e.g. movie ticket sales, Amazon, App Store, etc). There's also always an option to take the first confirmation (~24sec in Ethereum) as a sufficient proof for small transactions.

ancorevard 7y ago

Love your work!

tomcam 7y ago

If you were a customer of Stripe, would you feel you were being treated well by this policy after you'd already been dealt a refund?

sovande 7y ago
No, this is infuriating, but we must not forget that they “built an ML engine to automatically optimize bla bla bla.” But really, pretense should be off. Stripe is nothing more than a PayPal clone. Even the refund policy is now perfectly cloned. Someone here said that the only way our discontent can be heard is for us to switch between platforms regularly. Right now, PayPal does not look so bad. Their API and documentation has also become pretty good. Of course, the better thing would be to just get a merchant account and drop all these middleman leeches. Apropos, don’t get me started on the AppStore were we only pay 30% for the privilege
- thowfaraway 7y ago
  PayPal does not look so bad. Their API and documentation has also become pretty good. Documentation has gone form terrible to bad. API has gone from always terrible to appearing OK but will periodically destroy your happiness and productivity for a week. I would never voluntarily work with PayPal tech.
  - sovande 7y ago
    > I would never voluntarily work with PayPal tech. Really, for your company's sake I hope what matters is not what you like, but that your company has a payment solution that does not stop working when Stripe freezes your account. Yeah, Stripe is not an iota better than PayPal when it comes to freezing accounts. The only sane thing to do is to have a backend system that at minimum can use both PayPal and Stripe. With such a system it should be easy to change between PayPal and Stripe and I suggest that we all shutdown the Stripe part to show our discontent.

adrr 7y ago

The question you can answer about this change: Does stripe get interchangeable refunded from the card networks/banks on a refunded transaction? Also any of the big processors you can negotiate the refund of interchange just like you can negotiate interchange plus pricing instead of blended which I assume stripe even offers to big merchants like Shopify. I do wonder if Shopify drops stripe since the change has pissed off all their $100mm+ merchants and they may lose a few. There isn’t a long term contract in place just a 6 month notice to quit.

slivanes 7y ago

Does this keeping of fee also apply to voided non-captured payments? When PayPal pulled this change (yes, imo this is a scummy thing to do to merchants), I changed my PayPal flow only to authorize prior to doing the charge so that this refund fee could be avoided.

floatingatoll 7y ago

Is there a Stripe permalink (blog, tweet, etc.) from back in 2017 that describes this change back when it was announced? And/or for this year’s change, that drops the exclusion?

mstachowiak 7y ago

Thanks for replying on this thread, PC. I'm curious to get your take on how this plays out for customers with large average transaction values ($500+)? Stripe's cost to process and refund a payment, while not zero, is generally flat (card networks refund interchange fees, Stripe only has to cover the minimal cost of running the software to process the transaction, which is the same for all transaction sizes). Shouldn't the retained fees be flat and not a percentage?

rladd 7y ago

I was hit by this charge too, when doing some test purchases. Support said "use test mode for that", but test mode is NOT adequate to fully test a live production system. The keys are different, the card numbers are different... it should work the same but may not. With this policy change, there's no way to test a live production system without paying Stripe all the money it would have gotten if the charge were real. And that's just a minor case. What happens if a huge fraudulent charge is made and we undo it before shipping product? We potentially get hit with huge fees, for no particular reason: Stripe doesn't have to pay those fees to the processor if there's a refund (Stripe cofounder, please correct me if I'm wrong). That being the case, this is pure gouging and nothing else. And gouging because others gouge is not a good reason or excuse. Be better, don't stoop to their level.

kkarpkkarp 7y ago

> I can assure you that the ratio of people working on improving our payments stack to publishing is about 1000:1. @pc, I just checked that Stripe has about 1800 employees. Could I ask why so many? :) I wouldn't expect such a big number for the company providing one (?) product/service.

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ThePhysicist 7y ago

Slightly amusing story about “testing” payment flows in production: In Germany we have payment providers like Sofortüberweisung that ask you for your online banking credentials and then access your online banking via browser orchestration to initiate a transfer (I know it’s an utterly horrible idea from a privacy and security point of view). What they didn’t know initially was that some banks provide test accounts to customers where you can simulate transfers without transferring any money, and where you can simply enter your desired bank account balance (now that would be a killer feature for real online banking). Some people figured this out and used those fake accounts to make fraudulent orders. So if you offer such testing card numbers you should make sure your customers need a specific workflow to handle them (e.g. by returning a special error response code that can be distinguished from a normal error).

whatsmyusername 7y ago
Plaid works the same way. The tech is hilariously terrible and the best option currently.

temptemptemp111 7y ago

What would you recommend for a Stripe-backed SMB who has to turn away dozens of users per month because they only have some kind of "bank card" (which is normal in many European countries now). This business doesn't currently have the budget to implement support for all of these card types (Stripe UK does have support for most of them, it seems).

interpipes 7y ago

So in truth, what I'm hearing is "You should have noticed in 2017 when we started this process to begin with" (would that have helped, complaining at the time?) "We're confident we're not at a competitive disadvantage by doing this" "We developed our product " (to remain competitive) " and had to add a bunch of stuff that people expect card processing services to do " (more than one currency) " and some stuff many customers won't care about being delivered by a card processing service " (things other than cards) " and rather than charge the appropriate fees to the appropriate customers at point of use we are instead funding this progress by penalising customers who are already in the loss-making situation of having to make a refund"