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If it was, say, a $30000 charge I could give Stripe the benefit of doubt, but $3300 is a pretty ordinary amount for any retailer. Could be e.g. a laptop sale, o
by vemv 4y ago
If it was, say, a $30000 charge I could give Stripe the benefit of doubt, but $3300 is a pretty ordinary amount for any retailer. Could be e.g. a laptop sale, or three phones?
When I see Stripe's apology here it will not be enough for me - not at least without a detailed blog post / postmortem.
Until/if that moment happens, I'll regard Stripe as an untrustworthy entity and will recommend doing the same to do anyone I do business with.
Zero tolerance for Google-style algo-decisions and stonewalling.
- w4ffl35 4y agoi will be keeping all of this in mind the next time im making payment processing decisions for small businesses.
- leoff 4y ago> When I see Stripe's apology here it will not be enough for me I'm actually just starting a business using Stripe for handling payments, and this makes me very concerned. Is there an alternative service one could use? Is there a way not to give these shady companies power to steal all my money?
- informalo 4y agohttps://sumup.com https://sumup.com
- Ayesh 4y agoIn a different HN thread that has no or positive reaction to Stripe, you'd be seeing many praises for Stripe. For local businesses, perhaps your local bank has a better solution? They will be cheaper (if they use networks other than Visa/Master), and often has zero fees when you withdraw money to a bank account. Here in my country, for a business that only caters to local customers, I pay about 2% for payments with no fixed fee and no fee for withdrawals, which happens daily. I can directly call the person who handles my queries, and charge backs have never been anything but a few quick clicks with no mind games. All I do is redirect the user to the payment page, and validate the payment upon arrival. The UX isn't as good as Stripe of course, but many of the locals are quite used to that UI anyway.
- Aspos 4y agoDon't know what country you are from but guess your acquiring bank gets orders of magnitude less fraud than Stripe does so your bank can afford to take your calls. It boils down to wildly skewed regulatory environment in the US.
- InitialLastName 4y agoThey probably have orders of magnitude less revenue with which to pay customer service agents than Stripe has (or would have, if they hadn't delegated their customer service to the machine in the sky). We see this in many circumstances: centralization and scale are great for efficiency, but bad for resilience.
- vxxzy 4y agoCheck out PastePay. Great service and a human touch! https://www.pastepay.com https://www.pastepay.com
- groffee 4y agoOn Firefox page is just going into an infinite loop.
- TimCTRL 4y agoSame on Chrome 103
- radiojasper 4y agoCan confirm! Same here with my Firefox on Windows 10.
- enlyth 4y agoSame on Edge/Chromium
- thirdvect0r 4y agoHappening on FF, Chrome and Edge for me
- vxxzy 4y agoStrange!? Any chance you could send me request headers you are receiving?
- mmikeff 4y agoAnd Safari on MacOS
- mtlynch 4y agoBased on your other comment,[0] it sounds like you work for PastePay, which you should disclose if you're publicly endorsing them. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32263465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32263465
- sorenjan 4y agoMaybe look at Klarna. This is not an endorsement, I've never worked with them, but as a consumer i like using sites that use them for payment. https://docs.klarna.com/ https://docs.klarna.com/
- pythonic_hell 4y agoCheckout Adyen. They’re practically the same.
- stef25 4y agoHave you compared the backends you get to use as a customer? I'd be surprised if Adyen even comes close to Stripe. Mollie for one is complete garbage.
- Huppie 4y agoImho Adyen is surprisingly good. You should definitely check out their documentation.
- slivanes 4y agoYou need to do 5,000 transactions or more a month to be considered by Adyen.
- alex_suzuki 4y agoMaybe check out Paddle. I’m not affiliated in any way.
- tc313 4y agoJust as a counter-anecdote, my one-person SAAS has used Stripe since 2017 and I’ve had an excellent experience with them, including personal customer support. Of course, YMMV.
- PeterisP 4y ago> Is there an alternative service one could use? Is there a way not to give these shady companies power to steal all my money? There are many alternative services listed in other comments, but to be clear, every single one of them has the power to do exactly what Stripe did. There is no way to accept credit card payments without accepting that power to freeze suspicious incoming payments, simply because fundamentally credit card payments are not final and can (and often will) be reversed afterward, and if someone promised to never freeze merchants' funds, every fraudster in the world would come to try out their services, bankrupting them in the process.
- TimMeade 4y agoI'm not sure of the facts on this case and always need to hear both sides fully before i would comment on them. But; I have run 4 different businesses on stripe over about 6 years and have never had a serious issue. Yes there have been ups and downs but even with no phone number I would have to rate their support head and shoulders above most. Maybe 24-36 hours for a response, but we always got one, and in most cases it solved the issue. We are still with them.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- SyneRyder 4y agoYou should always, always, have multiple ways to accept payments. Don't rely on one provider, even if they're the greatest processor in the world. Never have a single point of failure for your business.
- treszkai 4y agoI'm not an entrepreneur but this approach sounds way too safe to be competitive. IMHO if you're starting a 2-person company then yeah, be bold enough to rely on a single payment provider, and maybe consider redundancy when you have already have a working business with massive reputation.
- SyneRyder 4y agoSingle person company here. It's not hard to do, maybe an extra PHP class that abstracts details of different providers, and a separate class implementation on each provider. But you're right that you wouldn't do it for launch day. It comes in really, really handy when your tiny 1-person company outlives your giant multinational payment provider. Happened to me a few times now, I'm on to my 3rd (4th?) provider in 20 years. There's a tendency for Borg-like consolidation in the payments industry (eg Avangate acquired 2Checkout, then were bought by Verifone). Anyone who lived through the Digital River era will know what I mean. If you haven't done that code abstraction, imagine that you're suddenly unable to take any payments or make any sales and you are unable to do so until you rewrite all your payment processing code. That can be a long outage. Having a backup is also useful when a customer's card gets declined by an overly zealous fraud screen at one provider. You can give that customer a "promocode" that changes the logic of your checkout flow and redirects processing to a different payment processor. And having different processors active also lets you add different payment options (eg maybe your primary processor doesn't support Alipay or Pay With Amazon). But in practice that turned out not to be a good reason for me, Paypal/Visa/MC/Amex/Optima covered almost 100% of customers anyway. For the tiny handful that use checks I can handle that manually.
- peanuty1 4y agoSquare is one option. https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-api https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-api
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- DebtDeflation 4y agoFlagging a larger than normal transaction is fine. Placing a 120 day hold is very much NOT fine. This should be resolvable within 24-48 hours after the business provides the requisite documentation showing the transaction to be legitimate. The root cause is a completely automated process devoid of any capability for human review like we see with so many online platforms these days.
- ceejayoz 4y agoDocumentation can be faked, and 120 days wasn't picked randomly; customers have that long to dispute charges.
- sgc 4y agoIt is a tiny amount of money comparatively speaking. They should not put a freeze over a couple of days. If there is no dispute, then their risk drops exponentially. If the amount were much higher, they should just devote more human resources to verifying the charge, and still keep the frozen period low.
- ceejayoz 4y ago> It is a tiny amount of money comparatively speaking. It's hardly the only charge of this nature.
- metacritic12 4y agoWhat's the OP/your alternative? Oh Paypal? Look up the horror stories there. Or directly work with a legacy provider like FirstData? They will also freeze your account and won't even accept you if you just have just $3k of sales. Isn't it interesting that credit card processors really like to give crappy customer support and enjoy freezing accounts? Is it because they just attract misanthropic people? If only a caring company that didn't freeze accounts and gave wonderful support could enter, the field would be better. /s Actually, the problem is super structural: - Due to payment processing regulations, there is a fixed overhead from taking a small merchant on. (KYC, AML, ensuring you're not selling drugs). This makes tiny merchants incredibly unprofitable to begin with. Legacy providers like FirstData will reject you outright or make you pay fees to onboard. They will also make you fill out pages of paper forms and put the time cost on you to verify you're a legit business. We as a society have said the gatekeeping features of finance are more important that making sure tiny businesses have access to payment infrastructure. We should change this parameter if we truly cared about this. I suspect we don't. - Merchants simply race to the CC provider that is easiest to set up or have lowest fees. If you were OK paying a couple of hundred dollars of setup fees to, you know, properly reimburse your vendor for vetting you, or pay 5% fees for a high risk (read: tiny merchant) specialty account, you probably wouldn't have been frozen like this, at least without them calling you. This is exactly the problem with Google services. Are you paying Google a bunch of money? If you are a high level enterprise account where the fully-burdened cost of a 1-hour customer support call (~$100) is a small part of your yearly net margin to Google, I bet they would take your call.
- viggity 4y agodidn't stripe (maybe it was a competitor, idk) go to a Paypal conference and took like 2000lb blocks of ice with dollar bills frozen in them and drop them off in front of the convention center? And then posted signs everywhere to the effect "tired of paypal freezing your money?"
- viggity 4y agoapparently it wasn't stripe, it was WePay. FWIW If you want to be able to quickly switch payment providers without stripe (or any provider) holding your customer's payment info hostage, you should consider using a PCI tokenization service like BasisTheory.com
- PeterisP 4y agoAll the alternative entities will also sometimes freeze funds for incoming credit card payments due to some algo-decision flagging them. Both fraud and such anti-fraud measures are an unavoidable part of the credit card infrastructure. The major difference is that some platforms offer more hand-holding support and some don't, but even those who will talk to you (e.g. your local bank) can and sometimes will refuse unblocking such funds for a prolonged time.
- icebergonfire 4y agoWithout taking away from your point, deep in the Reddit comments the OP states Stripe put a hold on the account after billing the sale of a literal company truck through Stripe and not via selling their normal store merchandise. https://reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/wa1zob/_/ihyq7tl/?context=1 https://reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/wa1zob/_/ihyq7tl... As usual, there’s always an undisclosed fact that changes the narrative and explains the ban. Whether this should trigger Stripe’s scorched earth mechanisms is another matter.
- civilized 4y agoMaybe there's more to the story, but executing transactions which do not conform to Stripe's fraud detection model is not an offense that should be punished.
- dachryn 4y agono the entire store account should not be blocked, at least not for a first offense, but I could understand that the transaction is blocked, and that it might that quite some time to figure out what is going on
- DuckyC 4y agoI think the fact that a company vehicle was sold for the $3300 hardly matters.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- wernercd 4y ago> not at least without a detailed blog post / postmortem. Can they legally give that considering its, most likely, private customer information? If they give detailed information out in a "Detailed" post mortem... isn't that proof that they are an untrustworthy entity? Just seems to me this is a damned if you do, damned if you don't attitude against Stripe (or, any company in general that has a complaint but can't do a "detailed" public response because, well, that's private information... .. . )
- patmcc 4y ago>>>but $3300 is a pretty ordinary amount for any retailer. Really? There are entire classes of retailers where that would be a truly exceptional event. I don't know if that's true of the OP (post removed), but if their average transaction is $27 or something this would rightly trigger alarm bells. If they are in fact being stonewalled on support that's pretty inexcusable though.
- Spivak 4y agoIt honestly seems like it would have been fine if they had been like "you tripped our fraud detection, and because the payment was made with a CC money will be held in escrow until the dispute period ends. There's no point in providing documentation because customer can still issue a chargeback."
- patmcc 4y agoI don't really disagree, except I think there are a couple different types of fraud Stripe might be on the lookout for in these types of cases: 1. Customer of retailer buys something with stolen cc, retailer is none the wiser, although Stripe has sophisticated techniques that suggest it might be fraud. Probably looks like a very ordinary transaction. e.g. person filling up gas tank with stolen card. 2. Accomplice of retailer buys something with "stolen" cc, retailer in on it. Probably looks like unusual transaction. e.g. person buying 10 laptops, reselling for cash, waiting until retailer gets money from Stripe, does a chargeback, retailer disappears, they split all the cash. If it's the first case, sure, tell the retailer. If it's the second (or it could be the second, which I think is what might be the case here), you probably maintain radio silence while you investigate. Edit: also, by all the documentation the OP wants to provide, it sounds like they understand why it could look like the second. If it's the first they should understand there's nothing they can provide that would suggest it's not a stolen card - it has very little to do with them.
- neurostimulant 4y agoThey seem to be using stripe to process transactions for a cell phone stores, but the $3300 transaction is for selling a van. I guess this tripped some fraud prevention system.