6 ms·

Tell HN: Stripe shut down my 4-year business with no explanation

83 points by buf 5y ago

I'm posting this as a warning to other startups who might be thinking of using Stripe to process payments. I was employee #10 at Eventbrite, founding engineer at Reforge, Techstars alum, startup founder X 3. I can't imagine treating my users like this and I am really upset with how Stripe is handling this situation. The situation: I own an online SaaS company that processes $500k+ per year through both Stripe and Braintree. I've been using Stripe for years. Today I received this email: [b]"Our systems recently identified charges that appear to be unauthorized by the customer, meaning that the owner of the card or bank account did not consent to these payments. This unfortunately means that we will no longer be able to accept payments for Refunds on card payments will be issued in 5–7 business days, although they may take longer to appear on the cardholder's statement. Please refer to your dashboard for a list of the charges to be refunded[1]."[/b] I have NO idea what payments they could possibly be referring to & support doesn't respond to my numerous messages. They won't tell me which payments are being refunded (dashboard link they provided just sends me to the list of ALL our payments). There was a button to verify my identity, which I did, and an hour later, I got: [b]"Thank you for completing our verification process. Unfortunately, after conducting a further review of your account, we’ve determined that we still won't be able to accept payments for xx moving forward."[/b] I have messaged my friends who work at Stripe, and edwin@stripe who works there who responded to the last HN thread there was about this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21030633). Until I get a response through a backdoor way in, my business is at a complete halt.

vxxzy 5y ago
Go check out CDG Commerce / Quantum Gateway. API and customer service is FANTASTIC! They’ve been around a VERY long time and actually care about their clients. It’s more traditional processing, but they work with a great number of online businesses.
h2odragon 5y ago
You've been in business 4 years, and it's never occurred to you to look into alternate payment processing? Surely you saw there was a risk of this?
- buf 5y ago
  I use Braintree as mentioned, but only for Paypal. I could technically switch over all new payments to go there right now, but I have 4 years of customer data in Stripe that would be horrible to migrate. In particular, dozens of renewals happen per day that are now being lost.
  - h2odragon 5y ago
    I don't use Stripe; assuming you still had access, how hard would exporting that data be? I'm also curious how rough the translation and reimport would be if you had an alternative, ready to go solution. "The customer DB" is sacred and untouchable to many businesses, and capturing that "as a service" is certainly a danger to the continued operation of a shop.
    - buf 5y ago
      I have all the information but would be unable to charge their cards, as that information is stored in Stripe and I do not store credit card information.
      - h2odragon 5y ago
        Manually call every customer, explain, and beg for details to re-enter? 20 years ago our shop was running a conference, and had offered folks a "pre-payment plan" for the signup fee; where they could pay the $495 or whatever in 3 installments. We ran this for a year, and then a month before the conference was to happen the AMEX processor we were using decided they didn't like our politics, refunded all the outstanding charges we had, etc. Sorting out who had paid what, if someone had paid with another card, or wanted a refund; was an absolute nightmare. Only about ~500 people iirc, but the fixups kept consuming time for months after.
- codegeek 5y ago
  You have a point but instead of blaming *edited from shaming* the OP, I would first worry about why Stripe cannot be more clear on what the issue could be. If the business was legitimately operating for 4 years, Stripe should do a bit more than just closing the account. Stories like this makes you wonder if aggregators like Stripe become too risky and you instead could be better off getting a merchant account of your own directly from a bank.
edwinwee 5y ago
(Edwin from Stripe here.) Just saw your email. I’m sorry for the trouble—we’re looking into this now.
- buf 5y ago
  Thanks so much, Edwin. Just some feedback from me. Here's email 1, which looks automated: > Our systems recently identified charges that appear to be unauthorized by the customer, meaning that the owner of the card or bank account did not consent to these payments. This means that we can no longer accept payments Email 2, which feels like a human looked at it: > Thank you for completing our verification process. Unfortunately, after conducting a further review of your account, we’ve determined that we still won't be able to accept payments for xxx moving forward. Finally email 3, definitely a human: > It looks like some activity on your account was misidentified as unauthorized, causing potential charge declines and the cancellation of your account. This was a mistake on our end, so we've gone ahead and re-enabled your account. There's a lot of mixed messages here that could lead customers, like myself, to freak out. It feels like there should be a different process. If it wasn't for me reaching out in a bunch of places, I would've been lost as a customer. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go take my heart medication.
  - partisan 5y ago
    These get more and more frightening as you go along. You shut down someone's business and you just casually mention you will re-enable them almost as if it is a favor? I'm sorry you are going through this.
    - raxi 5y ago
      Welcome to Platform Capitalism. I wonder how 3x startup founder got into such a vendor lock, having no backup plan in case when a vendor cancels.
- thunkshift1 5y ago
  Edwin from stripe - is it too much to ask to have an actual human look at the data and make decisions that concern someones finances and earning situations? What does a ‘100B’ startup even mean if you cant even invest in some decent customer care and outreach… looks like nothing was learned from the Robinhood fiasco.
navd 5y ago
I'm currently running into this but the shutdown didn't occur until I was preparing for launch this week. I've gotten some success reaching out to them on Twitter but it's been a slow process convincing them that my business does not violate any of their T&C... Please let me know if you have any other tips on resolving this in a fast manner...
- buf 5y ago
  Apparently the answer is create a Hacker News thread, tweet about it, have your Stripe PM friends contact internal support, have your VC friends round up some internal contacts in Stripe, contact old Stripe employees... ...until a real life person from Stripe support finally gives you the time of day. Really poor process if you ask me.
  - RikNieu 5y ago
    Why do all major companies act like this? Facebook, Google, PayPal, Stripe... Is this being taught in some Ivy League module somewhere? I'm genuinely baffled.
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
      It doesn’t scale. As soon as you start doing things that don’t scale at scale, costs soar.
      - busymom0 5y ago
        How many businesses are they having to "shut down without explanation" that it doesn't scale? I understand if this was something like not responding to a wrong charge/refund etc for one customer. But here we are talking about shutting down someone's business without explanation. I do not think "scaling" is the problem here. Also as someone else mentioned, as much as I love hating on Amazon, customer support is one place where they are absolutely outstanding. I have been able to reach out to their chat support and get issues resolved multiple times (refunds/item returns etc). If Amazon can scale it, then so can these payment processors.
tkiolp4 5y ago
Something similar happened to the company I was working for a few years ago. They suddenly were unable to keep using Stripe for card payments. They implemented something I never knew if it worked out or not (I left the company shortly after): - they created a “payment promise” flow. Customers were businesses that were paying regularly, so this didn’t change at all, but instead of making a real payment via Stripe, they made a promise of payment at a later point in the future (this promise ended up as a simple Pdf stating the amount to be paid as soon as we could start charging again)
- atatatat 5y ago
  This is just known as a PO or Purchase Order in business/many regions; and is also how physical credit card "swipes" (run through a carbon paper copy 'machine') were settled ('back in the day').
rajacombinator 5y ago
Stripe is pretty well known for this behavior at this point. But yea, it sucks. Is the intersection of scammers and legit businesses who message CS frantically protesting that their business is legit really that high? Who cares when your front door UX is good enough and there are podcasts to do?

83 points by buf 5y ago

vxxzy 5y ago

Go check out CDG Commerce / Quantum Gateway. API and customer service is FANTASTIC! They’ve been around a VERY long time and actually care about their clients. It’s more traditional processing, but they work with a great number of online businesses.

h2odragon 5y ago

You've been in business 4 years, and it's never occurred to you to look into alternate payment processing? Surely you saw there was a risk of this?

buf 5y ago
I use Braintree as mentioned, but only for Paypal. I could technically switch over all new payments to go there right now, but I have 4 years of customer data in Stripe that would be horrible to migrate. In particular, dozens of renewals happen per day that are now being lost.
- h2odragon 5y ago
  I don't use Stripe; assuming you still had access, how hard would exporting that data be? I'm also curious how rough the translation and reimport would be if you had an alternative, ready to go solution. "The customer DB" is sacred and untouchable to many businesses, and capturing that "as a service" is certainly a danger to the continued operation of a shop.
  - buf 5y ago
    I have all the information but would be unable to charge their cards, as that information is stored in Stripe and I do not store credit card information.
    - h2odragon 5y ago
      Manually call every customer, explain, and beg for details to re-enter? 20 years ago our shop was running a conference, and had offered folks a "pre-payment plan" for the signup fee; where they could pay the $495 or whatever in 3 installments. We ran this for a year, and then a month before the conference was to happen the AMEX processor we were using decided they didn't like our politics, refunded all the outstanding charges we had, etc. Sorting out who had paid what, if someone had paid with another card, or wanted a refund; was an absolute nightmare. Only about ~500 people iirc, but the fixups kept consuming time for months after.
codegeek 5y ago
You have a point but instead of blaming *edited from shaming* the OP, I would first worry about why Stripe cannot be more clear on what the issue could be. If the business was legitimately operating for 4 years, Stripe should do a bit more than just closing the account. Stories like this makes you wonder if aggregators like Stripe become too risky and you instead could be better off getting a merchant account of your own directly from a bank.

edwinwee 5y ago

(Edwin from Stripe here.) Just saw your email. I’m sorry for the trouble—we’re looking into this now.

buf 5y ago
Thanks so much, Edwin. Just some feedback from me. Here's email 1, which looks automated: > Our systems recently identified charges that appear to be unauthorized by the customer, meaning that the owner of the card or bank account did not consent to these payments. This means that we can no longer accept payments Email 2, which feels like a human looked at it: > Thank you for completing our verification process. Unfortunately, after conducting a further review of your account, we’ve determined that we still won't be able to accept payments for xxx moving forward. Finally email 3, definitely a human: > It looks like some activity on your account was misidentified as unauthorized, causing potential charge declines and the cancellation of your account. This was a mistake on our end, so we've gone ahead and re-enabled your account. There's a lot of mixed messages here that could lead customers, like myself, to freak out. It feels like there should be a different process. If it wasn't for me reaching out in a bunch of places, I would've been lost as a customer. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go take my heart medication.
- partisan 5y ago
  These get more and more frightening as you go along. You shut down someone's business and you just casually mention you will re-enable them almost as if it is a favor? I'm sorry you are going through this.
  - raxi 5y ago
    Welcome to Platform Capitalism. I wonder how 3x startup founder got into such a vendor lock, having no backup plan in case when a vendor cancels.
thunkshift1 5y ago
Edwin from stripe - is it too much to ask to have an actual human look at the data and make decisions that concern someones finances and earning situations? What does a ‘100B’ startup even mean if you cant even invest in some decent customer care and outreach… looks like nothing was learned from the Robinhood fiasco.

navd 5y ago

I'm currently running into this but the shutdown didn't occur until I was preparing for launch this week. I've gotten some success reaching out to them on Twitter but it's been a slow process convincing them that my business does not violate any of their T&C... Please let me know if you have any other tips on resolving this in a fast manner...

buf 5y ago
Apparently the answer is create a Hacker News thread, tweet about it, have your Stripe PM friends contact internal support, have your VC friends round up some internal contacts in Stripe, contact old Stripe employees... ...until a real life person from Stripe support finally gives you the time of day. Really poor process if you ask me.
- RikNieu 5y ago
  Why do all major companies act like this? Facebook, Google, PayPal, Stripe... Is this being taught in some Ivy League module somewhere? I'm genuinely baffled.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    It doesn’t scale. As soon as you start doing things that don’t scale at scale, costs soar.
    - busymom0 5y ago
      How many businesses are they having to "shut down without explanation" that it doesn't scale? I understand if this was something like not responding to a wrong charge/refund etc for one customer. But here we are talking about shutting down someone's business without explanation. I do not think "scaling" is the problem here. Also as someone else mentioned, as much as I love hating on Amazon, customer support is one place where they are absolutely outstanding. I have been able to reach out to their chat support and get issues resolved multiple times (refunds/item returns etc). If Amazon can scale it, then so can these payment processors.

tkiolp4 5y ago

Something similar happened to the company I was working for a few years ago. They suddenly were unable to keep using Stripe for card payments. They implemented something I never knew if it worked out or not (I left the company shortly after): - they created a “payment promise” flow. Customers were businesses that were paying regularly, so this didn’t change at all, but instead of making a real payment via Stripe, they made a promise of payment at a later point in the future (this promise ended up as a simple Pdf stating the amount to be paid as soon as we could start charging again)

atatatat 5y ago
This is just known as a PO or Purchase Order in business/many regions; and is also how physical credit card "swipes" (run through a carbon paper copy 'machine') were settled ('back in the day').

rajacombinator 5y ago

Stripe is pretty well known for this behavior at this point. But yea, it sucks. Is the intersection of scammers and legit businesses who message CS frantically protesting that their business is legit really that high? Who cares when your front door UX is good enough and there are podcasts to do?