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That's somewhat a fair point, but I'll disagree. In that instance, the co-founder replied, but I've heard from a number of Stripe's other employees since then,

That's somewhat a fair point, but I'll disagree. In that instance, the co-founder replied, but I've heard from a number of Stripe's other employees since then, and in every case the customer support has been wonderful. Perhaps that's solely because they are still a startup, but given what I know now about the people themselves, I don't believe that to be the case. I don't mean my original comment to suggest that the co-founder will always be the one to respond to a tweet as Stripe grows, but I do suspect that their standards for customer service will remain high, and someone in the company will give a quick and quality response. That said, with Stripe, I believe that–even if they aren't the ones responding to every tweet, which is admittedly much to ask–the co-founders will continue to have an eye on what people are saying about them and interact appropriately, not wall themselves off. Edit to reflect your edit: I remember that HN thread where you brought up chargebacks. For anyone interested, they discuss how they handle chargebacks here: https://stripe.com/help/chargebacks https://stripe.com/help/chargebacks I can't attest as to why they manage chargebacks that way, and will not speculate beyond the note that they are still new and seem to be developing their service in response to customer feedback and perceived needs. For you, or anyone else who might be interested in requesting features regarding chargebacks or any other aspect of their service, I highly recommend writing in: support@stripe.com or https://stripe.com/help/contact https://stripe.com/help/contact. As I mentioned, they're very responsive, and seem to love the feedback.

saurik 15y ago
I am curious if you've ever actually called PayPal. I have received nothing but high quality support from them. You can call them throughout most of the working day (until 8pm PST, I believe), and they seem to have somewhat knowledgable engineers available at that tech tier. They also have a merchant technical support site that seemingly no one knows about where you can often get answers in the middle of the night (I often get responses back at 12:30). If you are even reasonably sized you can also ask for a dedicated account manager: I have the cell phone number of someone at PayPal whose job it is to find me answers to problems I have. Though, I cannot say PayPal is perfect. I have run into a bunch of annoying issues correlating settlements (bugs filed recently, will be curious to see if they get fixed), and their pricing is not the best that is out there (although is still better than Stripe). I am curious if you've looked into any alternatives. I've spent the last few days talking to Litle & Co, and I must say that the people there /love/ talking to you about payments... their booth at ad:tech was the most enjoyable conversation I've had about payments in a while, and I got to spend another half hour on the phone with them yesterday learning more about how bank ACH settlement works. Edit to reflect your edit ;P That is the page I just had gone and reviewed now. It still seems incredibly manual. I would not feel comfortable running a site at scale where I'm dealing with receiving e-mails in an undocumented (probably designed-for-humans) format as my only source of notifications for chargebacks. :( It is often these "at scale" issues that are seemingly not handled by them; example: per their API page, Stripe does not resend webhooks if there is an error in the response... doesn't this make them useless to rely on? Am I required to sit around and poll my transactions to feel 100% certain that I didn't miss something because my load balancer accidentally gave them a 503 during some traffic spike? :(
- michaelschade 15y ago
  I have called PayPal once before. The experience wasn't horrible, but it didn't leave me enthusiastic like Stripe's does. I'm not holding that against them though: it's only one mediocre experience, and I have not used them much because of the whole payment redirection thing (I did not know about their Pro account then). To be clear: I'm not actually saying that PayPal is bad. I don't have enough experience with them to weigh in one way or the other. I am merely saying that I do like Stripe. I'm not sure of Stripe's reasoning behind not resending webhooks, but I don't know that I care for them not resending them either. Perhaps this is something they'll be addressing in the future or otherwise have a legitimate reason.
  - kamaal 15y ago
    I have called PayPal once before. The experience wasn't horrible, but it didn't leave me enthusiastic like Stripe's does. Well, talking of facts small companies with a small customer base will always deliver better customer service than the larger ones. True test of these companies will come when their subscriber and customers run into millions(In paypal's case hundreds of millions). Imagine a situation where where 283 million registered customers and probably more unregistered buyers. Ensuring operations related to that magnitude of people work fine for 99.99% of the people, 99.99% of the times. And then ensuring the remaining get appropriate customer support is not just difficult but requires a lot of work to maintain and run. At that scale the founders will have a lot more different work to do. And addressing one user out of those hundreds of millions by communicating them on twitter might not scale properly. And the customer support employees are working in call center shifts. They are not going to be any more enthusiastic any more than other general call center employees. Coming to arcane policies, Now for all those millions of users. There are definitely going to some x% of crooks out there gaming the system. Frankly speaking if you don't have such policies you may actually end up putting a lot of your other buyers and other customers in trouble and expose them to fraud. The problem is in programmatically handling hundreds of millions of users and their problems is not easy. You can build a system to do payments et al, but that's only beginning. So any good payment gateway etc will ultimately end up looking like PayPal. PayPal works at a scale, Whether a new competitor will work at scale is question of time. But don't write PayPal off, It actually works well for those hundreds of millions of registered and more unregistered users.

saurik 15y ago

I am curious if you've ever actually called PayPal. I have received nothing but high quality support from them. You can call them throughout most of the working day (until 8pm PST, I believe), and they seem to have somewhat knowledgable engineers available at that tech tier. They also have a merchant technical support site that seemingly no one knows about where you can often get answers in the middle of the night (I often get responses back at 12:30). If you are even reasonably sized you can also ask for a dedicated account manager: I have the cell phone number of someone at PayPal whose job it is to find me answers to problems I have. Though, I cannot say PayPal is perfect. I have run into a bunch of annoying issues correlating settlements (bugs filed recently, will be curious to see if they get fixed), and their pricing is not the best that is out there (although is still better than Stripe). I am curious if you've looked into any alternatives. I've spent the last few days talking to Litle & Co, and I must say that the people there /love/ talking to you about payments... their booth at ad:tech was the most enjoyable conversation I've had about payments in a while, and I got to spend another half hour on the phone with them yesterday learning more about how bank ACH settlement works. Edit to reflect your edit ;P That is the page I just had gone and reviewed now. It still seems incredibly manual. I would not feel comfortable running a site at scale where I'm dealing with receiving e-mails in an undocumented (probably designed-for-humans) format as my only source of notifications for chargebacks. :( It is often these "at scale" issues that are seemingly not handled by them; example: per their API page, Stripe does not resend webhooks if there is an error in the response... doesn't this make them useless to rely on? Am I required to sit around and poll my transactions to feel 100% certain that I didn't miss something because my load balancer accidentally gave them a 503 during some traffic spike? :(

michaelschade 15y ago
I have called PayPal once before. The experience wasn't horrible, but it didn't leave me enthusiastic like Stripe's does. I'm not holding that against them though: it's only one mediocre experience, and I have not used them much because of the whole payment redirection thing (I did not know about their Pro account then). To be clear: I'm not actually saying that PayPal is bad. I don't have enough experience with them to weigh in one way or the other. I am merely saying that I do like Stripe. I'm not sure of Stripe's reasoning behind not resending webhooks, but I don't know that I care for them not resending them either. Perhaps this is something they'll be addressing in the future or otherwise have a legitimate reason.
- kamaal 15y ago
  I have called PayPal once before. The experience wasn't horrible, but it didn't leave me enthusiastic like Stripe's does. Well, talking of facts small companies with a small customer base will always deliver better customer service than the larger ones. True test of these companies will come when their subscriber and customers run into millions(In paypal's case hundreds of millions). Imagine a situation where where 283 million registered customers and probably more unregistered buyers. Ensuring operations related to that magnitude of people work fine for 99.99% of the people, 99.99% of the times. And then ensuring the remaining get appropriate customer support is not just difficult but requires a lot of work to maintain and run. At that scale the founders will have a lot more different work to do. And addressing one user out of those hundreds of millions by communicating them on twitter might not scale properly. And the customer support employees are working in call center shifts. They are not going to be any more enthusiastic any more than other general call center employees. Coming to arcane policies, Now for all those millions of users. There are definitely going to some x% of crooks out there gaming the system. Frankly speaking if you don't have such policies you may actually end up putting a lot of your other buyers and other customers in trouble and expose them to fraud. The problem is in programmatically handling hundreds of millions of users and their problems is not easy. You can build a system to do payments et al, but that's only beginning. So any good payment gateway etc will ultimately end up looking like PayPal. PayPal works at a scale, Whether a new competitor will work at scale is question of time. But don't write PayPal off, It actually works well for those hundreds of millions of registered and more unregistered users.