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The author mentions "functionally 1/3 of my customers" and "I can not stress how much this has f*cked over my business." Since they also mention that they woul

by jrowen 5y ago

The author mentions "functionally 1/3 of my customers" and "I can not stress how much this has f*cked over my business." Since they also mention that they would like to hear what people think about this situation, here's my take: They deployed a major change/migration to their billing system, implementing a brand new product, and seemingly didn't bother to investigate how it was going beyond cursory looks at a dashboard. Even though they did notice a strange dip in revenue. That seems fairly negligent for one of the most critical aspects of your product. Doesn't take that much time to take a glance at a more detailed view than a dashboard. Stripe definitely could have been sending more notifications of failed invoices, made the documentation more clear, or been smarter about disabling automatic_tax for customers outside the user's tax jurisdiction. I don't know if the webhooks solution they mention is their standard for these kind of things or how much responsibility is reasonable for the user to monitor those. It does sound like they have/had at least some deficiencies with the new product that would have warranted a more generous response. The author did seem to realize what was up and how they could have fixed it but chose not to because they were mad at Stripe. I feel like the wrath is somewhat overblown, sometimes you take a risk on a brand new product and have to babysit it a bit more than something mature.

civilized 5y ago
I'm going to repeat what I said in a parent comment: > But what is your definition of "check to make sure the integration was working correctly"? Once you know what was going wrong, it's easy but unhelpful to say "you should have checked to see if that thing was going wrong". I'm sure he checked that Canadian tax was working, because that's what he bought Stripe Tax for. He didn't expect it to silently screw up his US customer payments, because he did not need to pay tax for them. He reasonably expected that Stripe Tax should have no impact on the payment of invoices for which no tax is owed.
- NorwegianDude 5y ago
  In what world does he not have to pay tax because the customer is in the US? You have to comply with tax regulations where the customer is located. And that is the problem that Stripe Tax helps with. If you only sell locally then it's not exactly hard to implement and stay up to date with the requirements where you live.

by jrowen 5y ago

civilized 5y ago

I'm going to repeat what I said in a parent comment: > But what is your definition of "check to make sure the integration was working correctly"? Once you know what was going wrong, it's easy but unhelpful to say "you should have checked to see if that thing was going wrong". I'm sure he checked that Canadian tax was working, because that's what he bought Stripe Tax for. He didn't expect it to silently screw up his US customer payments, because he did not need to pay tax for them. He reasonably expected that Stripe Tax should have no impact on the payment of invoices for which no tax is owed.

NorwegianDude 5y ago
In what world does he not have to pay tax because the customer is in the US? You have to comply with tax regulations where the customer is located. And that is the problem that Stripe Tax helps with. If you only sell locally then it's not exactly hard to implement and stay up to date with the requirements where you live.