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Help HN: Stripe shutting us down with 48 hours notice on a holiday skeleton crew

• ENGNR 5y ago
  That’s low
• ayoubElk 5y ago
  Damn! Stripe seems to be really dropping the ball recently.
• jimjams 5y ago
  So what reason did they give for not wanting to do business with you any more?
  • thiscatis 5y ago
    We're in delayed fulfilment hence some additional risk (quite some time between selling the service and delivering the service) so I get it 1. They already hold 50% (!!!) of all our revenue in reserve for 90 days for the last months (currently a couple of MILLION USD) 2. We are already in the process of moving away from Stripe but they have until now never pulled something so low. The reserves are already massively hurting us, hence moving to an actual acquiring bank but now giving us 2 days in between Christmas and NY is just insane.
    • thrwn_frthr_awy 5y ago
      You didn’t actually answer op’s question. What reason did they give you? What part of the TOS did they say you are violating?
    • nailer 5y ago
      So was the answer “stripe think we’re committing fraud by charging for and not delivering goods because of this delay” or something else?
      • thiscatis 5y ago
        Nope, we're in travel and hospitality (so people book early and stay later) and they don't want to bear the refund risk with Covid-19. Again, I'm not forcing Stripe to do business with us (even though we never had issues in 4 years and processed millions through them). I just want them to give us a bit more time than 48 hours to switch to another processor in between Christmas and NY.
        • csomar 5y ago
          I don't get it. Are you charging people before their stay? In most of my experiences with Booking.com or hotels themselves, I settle the bill (with my card) at the end of the stay.
          • Reason077 5y ago
            Many hotel booking sites do charge at the time of booking, particularly when the booking is heavily discounted / non-refundable.
          • refurb 5y ago
            Depends. Many sites offer non-refundable reservations for a cheaper rate. You pay when you book.
          • philliphaydon 5y ago
            booking.com always charges me before I fly. Same with agoda and another site I’ve used which name eludes me. Never had the option to pay at the hotel upon arrival.
• DantesKite 5y ago
  Need more context.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• midasuni 5y ago
  > So hoping that someone here can escalate. Ahh the modern P/I/SAAS method of working. What’s your resilience plan? Surely you have a plan if a supplier stops working with you? With 10M revenue it seems irresponsible to have all your eggs in one basket.
  • thiscatis 5y ago
    More than happy to do a post-mortem and to satisfy your valuable insights later.
    • egeozcan 5y ago
      While I also would love to hear what you have planned and what failed (I would have worded it differently though), even if you did plan for this, 48h notice and that on a holiday season sounds absurd and may not even be enough for "just changing a config and testing the system through". It's mean and you shouldn't feel too bad.
    • midasuni 5y ago
      It’s a valuable lesson for others who don’t have and test their backup plans
  • mrweasel 5y ago
    I have no idea why people are downvoting you, because you're absolutely right. Tens years ago I implemented a payment service for the ecommerce site I worked for. Our main fear wasn't that a payment provider would cancel our contract with 48 hours notice, but it was certainly something that concerned us. Our main goal was to work around instabilities as the PSPs at the time. They where nowhere near as stable as we would have liked. We also wanted to be able to add or move between PSPs in the future, to get better deals. At any given time we had active contracts with at least two PSPs providing credit card clearing, as well as a few with "buy now, pay later" options and a few payment options for various local markets. The service/gateway I build would take a order and return a list of payment options that would be valid. Valid meaning available in that country, valid in terms of total amount, insurance and so on. The customer could then pick whatever payment option they preferred. We where able to turn on or off payment options with a checkbox. So if/when a PSP went down, we could just switch to our backup PSP. Sure the cost would be a bit higher, but that's preferable to losing the order. Pushing $10M+ though just Stripe, and betting that they will never be down, never fail, and never decide that you violated some rule is nuts. I'm not even faulting Stripe, because other providers WILL do the same.
• starklevnertz 5y ago
  You’ve come to the right place! This is where the Stripe CEO will reply to you when all their support processes have failed, and you have no other course to save your business. That’s the way all $122billion companies operate. If he hasn’t been here yet, stay on hold he’ll be here soon. Patrick? Catastrophic customer support fail call for you…. (Call waiting music….) Oh dear he’s on Christmas holidays. I’m pretty sure their automated processes suspended your account for good reason. If you feel this is not correct, email your case for why you should be allowed by us to have a working business to noreply@stripe.com
  • zerr 5y ago
    Did anyone notice if Paypal CEO is also hanging here?
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • ognarb 5y ago
      That would be nice to know, our non profit organization is struggling to get a Braintree account enabled and their customer support just doesn't answer us.
      • styles 5y ago
        We used Braintree and during the time they were bought out by PayPal and all th terrible PayPal support was integrated. We could never reach a live person at Braintree again and ended up switching processors. It's scary to think a processor can't answer a phone call but hold your entire business' money in their hands.
      • weasel_whiplash 5y ago
        For what it's worth, we recently tried to get a new Braintree account set up (this summer) and ended up in the same situation. After a few months of trying to get in touch with them, a coworker of mine was told that Braintree is being integrated into PayPal and is no longer accepting new customers. We ultimately had no other choice than to switch payment processors.
• polote 5y ago
  > I know a lof of of Stripe are reading here including pc Why don't you directly reach out to them, instead of posting to HN?
  • thiscatis 5y ago
    We have, and their support needs more time to answer our email or chat queries than they've given us notice. So I guess they do observe holiday support times, just not for their customers.
  • saagarjha 5y ago
    I thought posting to Hacker News was the best way to contact Stripe? ;)
    • HelloNurse 5y ago
      There's a joke about the CEO in another comment, but HN should actually be an appropriate place to reach Stripe employees who might care about making the company look good; after failure with official customer support, it's the best communication channel I could think of.
      • bruce343434 5y ago
        It shouldn't. We're on hackernews. This is not news. Nor is it about tinkering. It's literally just a "help me, I'm getting taken in the behind by $bigco" post. I don't want to see this place turn into a tech support forum, and no I don't care how much money is involved.
        • HelloNurse 5y ago
          The standard operating procedure for turning this kind of problem into news is writing about it indignantly on one's blog, on Twitter, etc. and then linking to the newsworthy episode of shameful corporate insensitivity inspiring public outrage. But this time it isn't mere indignation, the OP is desperate. How much money is involved matters.
• jeroenhd 5y ago
  That sucks. What reason did they give you? Something vague like "you broke the terms of service" or something more specific? What could customer support tell you? I read you're in the hospitality business, did a whole bunch of people cancel/chargeback because of the omicron covid wave, maybe? Just trying to see if there's any reason Stripe may have picked this moment to kill your contract with them rather than any other. From a business perspective I can see why the timing sucks but this week is just another week, especially with Christmas and NY falling in the weekend. Companies generally try not to pull these stunts around (American) holidays, but there's nothing more special about this week than there is about next week or the week before. You can't expect Stripe to turn off their fraud department for two weeks because it makes the flagged companies sad.
  • thiscatis 5y ago
    There are other options such as stopping payouts completely and holding 100% in reserve, not shutting down completely within 48 hours.
    • jeroenhd 5y ago
      Based on your existing troubles with them, they've probably already got your account flagged as "problematic" in some way. If I were to design an anti fraud system, I'd make sure that the more problems I have with an account, the swifter I can react to changes. The payment processor may be more liable to cover damages if they already had a hunch that the company they were dealing with was bad when fraud took place. Sounds to me like they just wanted you out and found a reason to get rid of you.
  • namdnay 5y ago
    The real reason is probably because OP’s company “pomelopay” are advertising themselves as a payment provider, apparently leveraging Stripe (as some form of bootstrap hack?). I imagine Strioe don’t like that?
• solididiot 5y ago
  So, unicorns in 2022 seem to do support by Hacker News pledge. Good luck resolving this.
• locallost 5y ago
  Hope you get help, but I know which provider I won't be using in the future.
• sparkling 5y ago
  General question: when switching payment processors, is there some way of taking all those pre-authorized card details with you? Or is the only way to re-prompt all customers for their card details again?
  • thiscatis 5y ago
    No, this is called merchant tokenisation (the token only works with that specific processor and that merchant) so you generally can't transfer over pre-auths unless you actually hold the auth code and card details yourself.
    • Benjamin_Dobell 5y ago
      Sure you can. Stripe explicitly support this: https://stripe.com/docs/security/data-migrations/exports https://stripe.com/docs/security/data-migrations/exports However, the card details don't go to you. They'll transfer the card details to another PCI compliant payment processor.
      • thiscatis 5y ago
        Thanks for linking this, will come in handy.
• rosndo 5y ago
  • Aeolun 5y ago
    After 4 years of doing the same thing?
    • zachrip 5y ago
      We don't know if this is true, the author hasn't shared much context in this regard. Better not to speculate.
    • rosndo 5y ago
      How do you know? @dang perhaps my previous comment didn’t deserve to be flagged?
• emerongi 5y ago
  Do you not get to negotiate different terms after X revenue and Y years of customership? The fact that they can end the contract on their side with only a 48h notification period is honestly baffling. I'd expect better terms.
• DenisM 5y ago
  Whoa. Does Authorize.net ever do anything like this? This gives me heebie-jeebies…
  • Andys 5y ago
    No, they are not well organized enoug!
• sigmaprimus 5y ago
  Everything about this sounds Phishy to me. Unless You are We-Travel there is something wrong with your supposed numbers and I doubt a company that is listed as a premier flagship customer of stripe would be getting the boot before they took down their promotional material regarding We=Travel. Are You sure your not just dreaming/sleep walking right now? Just to put things in a bit more perspective You claim that You gross between 60 and 100 million per year in sales. Anyone can do a google search of the top global travel companies based on sales and unless You are in the top 100 those numbers don't jive. Any top 100 in the world company would have their lawyers all over this, even over the Christmas to New years dearth.
• cm2187 5y ago
  A question on credit card fraud. Almost all the payments I make online require some form of 2FA from the bank. Doesn’t that cut fraud to zero?
  • eurasiantiger 5y ago
    You said ”almost all”.
  • g_p 5y ago
    Not necessarily - payment processors are still concerned about delayed fraud claims. Not all "fraud" is "it wasn't the cardpayer who authorized this transaction". The risk team is also thinking about the likelihood of chargebacks - certain industries or sectors see far higher chargeback rates than others, and therefore many processors will refuse to deal with them. Other areas of heightened risk of fraud could be non-delivery of goods (physical item never arrives, resulting in claim via card issuer), defective goods or not-as-described (merchant is just box shifting crap they've never actually seen, and complaints will arrive), or insolvency of the provider. There have been cases in travel and hospitality where processors put 6 month cashflow halts on funds, to manage the perceived risk of non-delivery. This can in itself be enough to bankrupt the company relying on the processor! (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyglobespan#Financial_difficulties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyglobespan#Financial_difficu... for an example in the UK affecting an airline, where the card processor placed a halt, but had actually spent or otherwise exappropriated the funds)
  • jordansmith 5y ago
    I don’t think that is the norm for most people is it? I only get a 2fa confirmation if it’s some absurd amount of money
• globalise83 5y ago
  Not very helpful right now, but when your short term issue is resolved you should look into integrating with a payment orchestration layer so that you could easily switch payment processors without having to reintegrate.
  • mahesh_rm 5y ago
    Can you provide a few examples of the most common such offerings?
    • faizshah 5y ago
      For ruby there is a nice library from Shopify offering a huge number of payment gateway integrations: https://github.com/activemerchant/active_merchant https://github.com/activemerchant/active_merchant
    • tylerrobinson 5y ago
      Not affiliated with them, but Spreedly is an example of a company in this space.
• g_p 5y ago
  Thinking aloud here, it does seem like (as we've always known), anyone doing eCommerce online is effectively beholden to their payment provider. Given Stripe is pretty popular, it feels like for many it is becoming the "S3" of payments in terms of an API. Would it be viable for others to implement the same API on the basis of compatibility, portability and interoperability? In the past, I recall dealing with systems where you'd have multiple backend processors for major external functions, and you'd load balance which provider was used. Some might have more favourable pricing, and be a preferred partner, while others might be potential future preferred partners being tried out (see how many failures you get from them, compared with the current preferred partner). It seems that, if this was possible to implement (card tokenization obviously being an issue here), you could have multiple independent backend providers implementing the Stripe API as a provider, and you load balance across them. Just like how you could use another S3 API provider for storage if one is giving you hassle, or not offering satisfactory performance or support. Sure, you have migration work to do, but having the same API and underlying properties should speed things up and let you get new transactions onto the new storage ASAP. ACME is like this for SSL - there's now multiple CAs implementing the one API. Could we get there for payments too?
  • Joe8Bit 5y ago
    A good point, and may help in this case, but often when onboarding with a payment processor (especially at the 5-10m a month level of the OP) the majority of the time/complexity isn’t the technical integration. The complexity is usually compliance (eg KYB, sanctions checks, AML) and while payment processors have done a lot to reduce the time and complexity it can still be a long and painful process. In my experience (I’m CTO at a payment network) technical integration is <10% the time for a merchant doing this kind of volume moving processors. Finally, what you described has happened. A lot of payment processors have been heavily influenced by Stripe’s DX and align relatively closely, or at least closely enough to make transition easier. The challenge is that few even medium sized merchants just use the core ‘move money’ APIs that are ‘easily’ replaceable, they use things like reporting/reconciliation, anti-fraud and a host of other products that make up an ‘ecosystem’ of products that in combination is very hard to replace quickly.
  • mrweasel 5y ago
• atdrummond 5y ago
  Email me at alex@staqq.co I work in this space and I’m sure we can at least get you up on something temporary while we sort this out.
• mariogintili 5y ago
  all big tech companies get away with shit customer service because we take it in the ass Why not leave them indefinitely? They get to slack on this and send everyone on to a switchboard because we keep using them
• 1cvmask 5y ago
  Is this common at all with other PSPs? What line of work is your business in by the way?
  • mrweasel 5y ago
    The only time I've seen a PSP give a time frame this short is because we accidentally provoked VISA. We had some VERY cheap products, like $2, and an insanely easy checkout. Some one in the UK created a bot to buy these products to verify stolen credit cards. VISA found out before we did, and basically told us to shut it down or lose the ability to accept VISA cards. All this was communicated via the PSP.
• ianai 5y ago
  I feel for you. But why run skeleton crew for one of the highest revenue periods in hospitality? Makes you vulnerable at the worst time and sorta kinda a little arrogant.
  • exotree 5y ago
    Plenty of companies right now are trying to give their workers a break to prevent burnout, keep talent, etc. Not to mention a lot of folks request this time off for the holidays anyway. Losing your payment processor in 48 hours would just be as substantial of an issue even if they had an entire crew anyways.
    • ianai 5y ago
      This is simply the nature of the hospitality industry. If you get burned out working holidays then hospitality is not for you. It’s a blunt fact of the business case.
• FreeHugs 5y ago
  Will this type of thing still happen when/if we all are using crypto payments? I know that bringing up crypto creates a strong positive/negative "with us or against us" reaction. But it would be great if we could discuss this question on a technical level this time! It is a real question: Will using Bitcoin and the lightning network (or similar technologies) free us from the constant fear that a human or algorithmic error kills our business?
  • Griffinsauce 5y ago
    Will there be a service in between you and that network? If so, yes.
    • FreeHugs 5y ago
      Someone correct me if I am wrong, but I think it is pretty easy to run a lightning node. And then no service is between you and the network.
  • heavyset_go 5y ago
    Doubt it, because if you wanted to buy a $2 candy bar with Bitcoin in April, it would have cost you over $50 to do so. Stripe charges a rate of 2.9% + $0.30 by default. Everyone but money launderers would choose to use any other payment method than Bitcoin.
    • FreeHugs 5y ago
      Layer two solutions like the lightning network make payments almost free. Much cheaper than using Stripe.
      • throwaway2048 5y ago
        They also remove almost all the supposed decentralization and trustless model benefits of bitcoin
        • 5y ago
• dinkblam 5y ago
  don't switch to Paddle. they shut you down immediately, without 48 hours notice, and without reason at all. and if their GitHub issue system is full of angry customers, they just delete all GitHub issues and comments, instead of improving their service/product. thats why we switched to Stripe, believing they wouldn't shut you down without reason.
  • chinathrow 5y ago
    It's as if payments are ripe for disruption... /s.
    • quickthrower2 5y ago
      Its all solved by cryptocurrency but just need another decade for adoption as a functional day to day currency!
      • chinathrow 5y ago
        Is this sarcasm?
        • Sebb767 5y ago
          No. Despite their current use as speculation objects or pyramid schemes, they were originally designed to be exactly that, a digital hard-cash replacement. Unfortunately, their use as the former makes the use as the latter currently very unattractive.
          • salawat 5y ago
            It's not a cash alternative with the kind of paper trail blockchain creates. Just saying. The perks of cash don't stop at what everyone considers virtuous or convenient to those looking to control economic activity from the top down.
          • chinathrow 5y ago
            My commet was about the "it's all solved" part of the comment. Would you really consider payments are solved with crypto?
• popinman322 5y ago
  Have you contacted the support team yet? Escalation likely requires an open ticket.
• trollied 5y ago
  Just thought I'd point out that, unless the OP has moved companies, the OP runs a payment provider: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27674236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27674236 That does not tie in with the OPs comments in this thread. I am happy for the OP to correct me, but thought I'd mention this.
  • namdnay 5y ago
    The plot thickens..
    • mbesto 5y ago
      There's always two sides to every story. I especially love the unfounded claims of "skeleton crew" as if this Stripe customer has any insight into how many people are actually working during the holidays.
      • createmyaccount 5y ago
        He’s talking about his own company.
    • quickthrower2 5y ago
  • sigmaprimus 5y ago
    • namdnay 5y ago
      My suspicion is that they were hacking their way to growth by basically rewrapping Stripe until they got their own solution up. Stripe cottoned on, the game is up. That would explain the vague answers
      • sigmaprimus 5y ago
• albertopv 5y ago
  I don't know the reasons for this, Stripe is also not so used in Italy, btw I think you should never, ever, rely on a single PSP, they have too much power. More than two years ago we had to add electronic payment to the proprietary B2B ecommerce I was working on, first thing was to design an architecture as indipendent as possibile from a specific PSP.
• zx76 5y ago
  This feels like more like a Reddit post than an HN one to me - light on the details with plenty Russell Conjugation [1]. I know Stripe has had it's support lapses but I highly doubt they'd just suddenly suspend an account doing $10 million per month without any prior engagement. In fact, lower down the thread we can in fact see the OP mentions that rather than processing since 2018 "without issues" as they claim in their post they had their reserve requirements increased a few months ago by Stripe to 50% of revenue held for 90 days! This is a very substantial reserve requirement and presumably there was a conversation between Stripe and the OP's company at the time about the fraud or risk profile that lead Stripe to impose these increased reserve requirements. Presumably whatever prompted the increase in reserve has got worse and caused Stripe to decide the business relationship is no longer worth it. On the other hand - just 48 hours to leave doesn't seem like fair play. So either 1. the OP is misrepresenting the communications they've had with Stripe over the past few months (including how abrupt the shut down notice from Stripe actually is), or 2. Stripe really will make snap algorithmic decisions over the future of businesses without remorse... Maybe there's a way for Stripe to show which it is without breaking any of their privacy considerations. [1] https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27181 https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27181
  • namdnay 5y ago
    or 3) OP is misrepresenting their business (they're a payment provider themselves, not a merchant), and is staying deliberately vague because they're never told their customers they were actually relying on Stripe. From OP's website (pomelo pay): > By partnering with international banks in 2018 we engineered a simple and effective method for their merchants to receive payments using secure QR code technology. > In 2020 the world has changed and social distancing has become the norm. From city-based side-hustlers to local sole traders there is a need for flexible, safe and adaptable finance tools that are reassuring, not rigid. > We truly believe that our toolkits, that include low-cost payment features, simple e-commerce platforms and innovative QR code solutions, will help businesses get back on their feet without costing the earth.
    • chinathrow 5y ago
      Could they be using Stripe Connect for this? https://stripe.com/connect https://stripe.com/connect
• robertpohl 5y ago
  Mondido CEO is hanging around here! ;)
• xwdv 5y ago
  I’ll get to straight to the point: You’re screwed. Also this kind of post style where you air out dirty laundry (if the story is even true) is unlikely to inspire anyone at Stripe to help you. I know some people that work there through my LinkedIn.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• alibarber 5y ago
  Honest question - I am not familiar with the business realities of taking payments, but here goes: At most companies I’ve worked at, we’ve at least done an exercise in keeping our core business process running or available on a competing cloud / connectivity provider or OS, or on prem and offsite. Is it impractical to try and do this with your payment processor? I.e route every 3rd customer to PayPal instead of stripe? Legislative / contractual reasons prohibit this perhaps? Absolutely not blaming the OP here for their situation, a business has made promises of an easy life for payment processing, they’ve (presumably) been paid by the client but are now causing trouble - this is clearly crappy. But it is not exactly uncommon sadly. Edit: Further reading of the comments here do seem to make out that this case in particular might not be as clear cut as first seen. But my general question still stands.
  • jacquesm 5y ago
    Having a backup payment processor is fairly standard for legitimate businesses.
• adxl 5y ago
  Did they give you a reason that they are pulling the plug? Was it because your fraud numbers are too high or something? This same thing happened to a startup I confounded on a Friday afternoon with Chase Payment Services (Paymentech). It was because our fraud numbers had breached 1% which was their line in the sand fraud limit. We switched to Braintree in a few hours, we already had that code built as a backup.
  • coolspot 5y ago
    TBH 1% fraud seems like a lot.
• edwinwee 5y ago
  I work at Stripe—I’m sorry for the trouble. Could you email me at edwin@stripe.com and we can dig into this?
• djohnston 5y ago
  I feel for you. I had issues with Stripe, and it's one of the reasons I started building dapps on ETH. People read these stories and still think there's no usecase for a decentralized financial system.
• giomasce 5y ago
  As somebody doing web development for a small business (run by my wife) selling courses online and using Stripe for payment processing, I am a bit concerned by this and other similar posts. So far Stripe has always run smoothly for us (FWIW, we never had a single dispute), but I'd like to have an exit strategy. What other other payment processors similar to Stripe you would suggest? So far I basically only care about credit cards (not other payment methods).