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Don't want to defend them, but it must be bloody hard to be a large payment processor these days. I guess they don't disable paying customers (which, en masse,

Don't want to defend them, but it must be bloody hard to be a large payment processor these days. I guess they don't disable paying customers (which, en masse, must be still significant revenue) out of sheer lousiness.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
No, that's pretty much what they do. The problem is that you're a small business that doesn't make a ton of money, and they only make <1% of that, which is almost nothing, so if they even vaguely suspect you of anything they burn down your house just to be sure. The solution to this would be something like account number portability, similar to phone number portability. You have an account with a payment processor, you have a dispute with them, you port your account to a different payment processor and your customers never know the difference. Which you could also do if a competitor offered better rates, which is why they typically don't offer this. But if they weren't dicks they would. In general, but especially if they expect to be able to drop you without being accused of malice. A company shouldn't be able to lock you in and then shut you down. One or the other, never both. And, of course, they have to be able to do the second one, so they should never be able to do the first one.
- smca 3y ago
  Someone asked this recently. You can move your Stripe data to/from any PCI DSS level 1-compliant provider, so what you're saying isn't accurate. To Stripe: https://stripe.com/docs/payments/account/data-migrations/pan-import https://stripe.com/docs/payments/account/data-migrations/pan... From Stripe: https://stripe.com/docs/payments/account/data-migrations/pan-export https://stripe.com/docs/payments/account/data-migrations/pan...
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    That's actually useful. Can you do that even when your account is locked? How many other companies can you transfer the data to and which are they?
  - tzs 3y ago
    How are recurring payments handled? My recollection of the changes that Visa and MC made a few years ago when they tightened the rules on using stored cards was that for cards stored after those changes went into effect you had to include in the data when submitting a card not present transaction a copy of the transaction ID of the card present transaction that you did when you stored the card. I've not used Stripe so have no idea how you handle it. The other payment processors I've used all return their own transaction ID when you charge a card, not the actual Visa or MC transaction ID from the card network. Internally they maintain a mapping from their IDs to the underlying Visa/MC IDs and when you later do a not present transaction and give the reference transaction ID they look up the underlying Visa/MC ID and use that. My understanding then is that to move from processor X to processor Y I'd need not only all the stored card numbers at X (assuming I'm using their storage service and not handling card storage myself) and need a way to get for all those cards the underlying Visa/MC transaction ID for the transaction where the customer gave me the card. Then at processor Y they would have to support importing that data, including a way to import the underlying Visa/MC transaction IDs and assign them Y transaction IDs to be used when using those cards for not present transactions.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

No, that's pretty much what they do. The problem is that you're a small business that doesn't make a ton of money, and they only make <1% of that, which is almost nothing, so if they even vaguely suspect you of anything they burn down your house just to be sure. The solution to this would be something like account number portability, similar to phone number portability. You have an account with a payment processor, you have a dispute with them, you port your account to a different payment processor and your customers never know the difference. Which you could also do if a competitor offered better rates, which is why they typically don't offer this. But if they weren't dicks they would. In general, but especially if they expect to be able to drop you without being accused of malice. A company shouldn't be able to lock you in and then shut you down. One or the other, never both. And, of course, they have to be able to do the second one, so they should never be able to do the first one.

smca 3y ago
Someone asked this recently. You can move your Stripe data to/from any PCI DSS level 1-compliant provider, so what you're saying isn't accurate. To Stripe: https://stripe.com/docs/payments/account/data-migrations/pan-import https://stripe.com/docs/payments/account/data-migrations/pan... From Stripe: https://stripe.com/docs/payments/account/data-migrations/pan-export https://stripe.com/docs/payments/account/data-migrations/pan...
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  That's actually useful. Can you do that even when your account is locked? How many other companies can you transfer the data to and which are they?
- tzs 3y ago
  How are recurring payments handled? My recollection of the changes that Visa and MC made a few years ago when they tightened the rules on using stored cards was that for cards stored after those changes went into effect you had to include in the data when submitting a card not present transaction a copy of the transaction ID of the card present transaction that you did when you stored the card. I've not used Stripe so have no idea how you handle it. The other payment processors I've used all return their own transaction ID when you charge a card, not the actual Visa or MC transaction ID from the card network. Internally they maintain a mapping from their IDs to the underlying Visa/MC IDs and when you later do a not present transaction and give the reference transaction ID they look up the underlying Visa/MC ID and use that. My understanding then is that to move from processor X to processor Y I'd need not only all the stored card numbers at X (assuming I'm using their storage service and not handling card storage myself) and need a way to get for all those cards the underlying Visa/MC transaction ID for the transaction where the customer gave me the card. Then at processor Y they would have to support importing that data, including a way to import the underlying Visa/MC transaction IDs and assign them Y transaction IDs to be used when using those cards for not present transactions.