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Stripe Is the New PayPal

Dear HN, I am only writing this post because Stripe are not responding to my emails. I started using Stripe last month and everything was going smoothly. However, this week they sent me an email saying: "Stripe provides a service between banks and our users. In order to provide service to our users, we are urged by our banking partners to keep an eye on all accounts that sign up for our services. We've noticed that you have processed charges that seem to be unauthorized--in order to make charges with credit and debit cards, the owner of the card must consent to the charge. Charges on your account do seem to lack this consent, which unfortunately means that we will no longer be able to offer service" This makes no sense as I have had hundreds of payments and not a single payment has been disputed. So how could it be true that the payments are unauthorised? I have sent Stripe emails explaining this and they will not respond. I am very disappointed. As a member of this community I assumed Stripe would treat developers making a living online with a little more respect. I plan to write a lengthy blog post explaining this in more depth. Update: I am currently in contact with Stripe CEO over email. He is dealing with the issue. I will keep everyone updated.

elliotec 11y ago
Scary. I was hoping they'd remain the oasis in the harsh desert of online payment systems.
dangrossman 11y ago
What were you selling, how and to whom? I feel like there's probably more to this.
- happyscrappy 11y ago
  It is quite likely that certain outrage deflating details were left out. Stripe and Paypal are polar opposites in my experience.
  - onion2k 11y ago
    "I've had a good experience with Stripe so everyone must have unless it was their fault" is a good example of the Halo Effect. It's entirely possible that Stripe have failed one of their customers without it being the customer's fault. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect
    - happyscrappy 11y ago
      I said "quite likely" not "must have" which makes your argument very weak.
  - hluska 11y ago
    I'm trying hard to read your words, but I can't stop noticing your username and having Clerks flashbacks. Have a great day - you (inadvertently) started mine with a good laugh! :)
- jusben1369 11y ago
  I feel like this was the key part: "This makes no sense as I have had hundreds of payments and not a single payment has been disputed. So how could it be true that the payments are unauthorised?" Disputed and Unauthorized are two very different things - especially with the time frame of less than a month. It would have been much more convincing if he'd said "I've had hundreds of payments and all have been authorized by the end user" I suspect there's some sort of crowd funding element but either way shall wait to see what the blog post says.
gt565k 11y ago
In all honesty you probably got stuck in some automated loop. It is kind of sad that the support isn't more expedited for things like this. Seems like more and more people are turning to HN in order to get visibility and get their Stripe problems resolved. That is quite unfortunate... I upvoted for visibility, as I know how frustrating it is to deal with payment processors, especially when your living / business depends on it.
minimaxir 11y ago
> So how could it be true that the payments are unauthorised? Stolen cards, for instance, which may be more likely to happen in some industries than others. While I understand the need for ambiguity with respect to your business operations, this post is too vague to give any understanding as to why Stripe blocked your account.
- mangeletti 11y ago
  I think the ambiguity is transitive, and is the primary point of the OP, coupled with the lack of support received from Stripe thereafter.
- weego 11y ago
  The post talks about unauthorised charges. There is no way to validate the card prior to Stripe capturing payment, so they certainly are not upset about people using stolen cards on your own site, as you have no way of mitigating that. The migration to Stripe that I handled a year or so ago had 5 or 6 stolen cards/people iterating card lists looking for working cards per day and never had a complaint from Stripe. Once you have a card you can absolutely take arbitrary amounts of money from it, and this appears to be their suggestion. It could well be that they are using (purposely) vague wording that confuses people about their charging structure (in one off payments or subscriptions) which generates complaints to banks and then Stripe have to deal with it. Or it could be a big misunderstanding Stripe side and they have done nothing wrong. I have an opinion on which one I think is most likely.
  - ChuckMcM 11y ago
    Sort of. Some products are real magnets for stolen card use, for example anything that sells "gift cards" or "stored value card" where the crooks can convert a one time use of a stolen credit card into a 'clean' gift card. Some forms of merchandise are similar.
    - mootothemax 11y ago
      Some products are real magnets for stolen card use Charities also have huge problems with CC fraud, as they're seen as an easy target to test card details against before making the "full" purchase elsewhere: http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/stolen-cards-tested-on-charity-sites-a-7608/op-1 http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/stolen-cards-tested-on-chari...
jeffmould 11y ago
Someone else posted last night (I'm on my phone or I would search for the post) about Stripe support. Looking at their Twitter stream it appears they are having a very difficult time managing their support infrastructure and do not have a trouble ticket system. I love Stripe's API and have helped several clients integrate it, but as the developer-friendly, anti-PayPal processor they were once known for, this development is very discouraging. I know Patrick and John are active on here so hopefully they will see this and come up with a solution.
- woodhull 11y ago
  We've run into this as well. It's absurd that a company of their size has no support ticketing system. There have been occasions when we've had to rely on personal relationships with staff at Stripe to simply get an email response to our account questions. Engineering support is great and responsive through IRC but, stripe engineering staff there just shrug if you ask a business question.
  - jeffmould 11y ago
    Their engineering support is incredible, and their API is well-documented and so easy to integrate. It is hard to believe that they can't spend a little more time focusing on customer support, especially as they continue to add new features and countries the problem is only going to increase. At least adding a public-facing ticketing system would pull some pressure off. I don't necessarily mind waiting for support, it is the not knowing if you even received my support request that can be frustrating at times, especially when there are real dollars at stake.
    - jusben1369 11y ago
      I think one thing that is not well understood is that Stripe has a "Freemium" model. Prior to Stripe nearly all other payment processors required a minimum monthly fee. Stripe's lack of any minimum monthly fee is something that makes it very attractive and undoubtedly helped partly fuel their rapid growth. It's a great example of how you can leverage VC funding to build a business. Having said that it must mean a staggering amount of support emails from customers in "production". That developer doing just 1 or 3 transactions a month at $100 each still feels as strongly about getting an issue resolved as someone doing $1 million or $10 million a month. I've always wondered what that was like to manage.
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- brandall10 11y ago
  Err... https://stripe.com/docs/api#disputes https://stripe.com/docs/api#disputes
- wrong_internet 11y ago
  You are likely not a Stripe customer, because this is patently false. They forward all disputed charges to you and give you a window to provide evidence that the dispute is invalid.
- leesalminen 11y ago
  Right, and then the credit card company sends that information to the merchant via the gateway (Stripe). See: https://stripe.com/help/disputes-overview https://stripe.com/help/disputes-overview
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- toxican 11y ago
  >I am only writing this post because Stripe are not responding to my emails.
- ad_hominem 11y ago
  Stripe's CEO left his email here after the last kerfuffle and I never got a response to my emailed question.
ShirsenduK 11y ago
Have you tweeted to them?
- roosterjm2k2 11y ago
  The fact that this is a valid reply saddens me...
  - timboslice 11y ago
    Right? This is the financial industry, you shouldn't have to "publicly shame" a company to get a response. A ticketing system would give some organization to the chaos
    - eertami 11y ago
      Hell, I shouldn't have to register for a twitter account to be able to contact someone in any industry.
    - ShirsenduK 11y ago
      I wish we lived in a world where people actually did what they signed up for. Buy unfortunately we have machines who follow that rule. I came on Twitter very late and it was basically to shame and acknowledged good publicity.
  - giarc 11y ago
    It's very true. I recently had an issue with Expedia and was getting no where with phone or email support. I simply tweeted their public account with 140 chars of details and boom, they had "coincidentally" updated their TOS which meant my issue was now resolvable.
exelius 11y ago
This is what happens when you replace business relationships with APIs. APIs should complement a business relationship, not replace it.
hharnisch 11y ago
Have you tried tweeting at them? https://twitter.com/stripe/ https://twitter.com/stripe/ They're way more responsive over twitter than email.
- deadmik3 11y ago
  You shouldn't have to publicly tweet at a company about an issue regarding your bank accounts/debit cards to get their attention though
  - hharnisch 11y ago
    You don't have to, they accept DMs from people they don't follow.
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- kevinchen 11y ago
  My school tracks tickets with ServiceNow extensively and it's one of the worst pieces of software I've ever used. If you want enterprise, at least use JIRA Service Desk. They actually tried to design a good UI.
  - deleted 11y ago
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  - DortchOnIT 11y ago
    Um...ServiceNow includes a content management system and other features intended to make UI design very flexible, as I recall. So maybe your issues are more with the particular UI with which you're interacting, and not the underlying ServiceNow platform. Just a thought...
- giarc 11y ago
  When getting downvotes, the worst thing you can do is edit and ask why you are getting downvotes. That typically results in more downvotes.
  - deleted 11y ago
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  - Diamons 11y ago
    Why is that, and why are you supporting such sheer stupidity?
    - giarc 11y ago
      I think it's just a culture of "You shouldn't care about upvotes/downvotes, and editing your post to complain/gripe about receiving downvotes indicates you care way too much about them." Likely comes from reddit. Also, I'm not supporting it, not sure why you thought I was.
lnanek2 11y ago
Kind of reminds me of doing business with Google. Most times they ban you it is just a robot that has no clue it is wrong. They just set the thresholds ridiculously high and put up with false positives intentionally as a business choice. Throwing out some innocents is worth it to them to throw out anyone faking clicks or whatnot.
josefresco 11y ago
Square might be the new PayPal in that they're (finally) big enough to have banks breathing down their neck. Honestly, I think the hate is misplaced (for both Square and PP), and should be directed towards the banks who have pushed the security burden upon these tech providers.
wehadfun 11y ago
Something similar happened https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9619282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9619282
mseebach 11y ago
Pick two: - Strongly regulated banks/strong consumer protection in financial services. - Good merchant customer service. - Cheap credit card processing.
- stephengillie 11y ago
  Security/Convenience/Price Security and Convenience are a classic tradeoff. I suppose you could argue that a good implementation of either isn't cheap.
- ianhawes 11y ago
  Stripe hardly qualifies as "Cheap credit card processing".
johnnyg 11y ago
We've been with Stripe going on a year and a half and they've been one of the most responsive and with it service providers I've ever worked with. Can you tell us how long it has been since you sent the email? There must be some level of fraud prevention in any financial platform. You didn't give many details as to the type of charges you made or evidence past "no one charged back" as to how you made them. This is a public platform and I understand less than full disclosure but your narrative that: 1. You signed up 2. You charged people legitimately 3. You were cut off without notice 4. No one responded to multiple attempts over more than 1 business day 5. You were forced to take this action Seems unlikely to be the full and absolute time line of events. If it is, ok, post to HN and troll them. If not, is this really the medium? Doesn't stripe get a say on which transactions will and won't process on their own network? If your expectation is "everything charges all the time period" then use bitcoin. These are credit cards. There are rules. :-)
- timboslice 11y ago
  I think you forgot a word: >Doesn't stripe get a some say on which transactions will and won't their own network?
  - johnnyg 11y ago
    Sorry for the typo, updated.
- mootothemax 11y ago
  Seems unlikely to be the full and absolute time line of events. Ironically, we've seen this before with the many complaints about PayPal. While I'm open to the idea we're getting the full story here, I think your view may turn out to the right one.
- task_queue 11y ago
  > Seems unlikely to be the full and absolute time line of events. Credit card processors do this all the time.
anurag 11y ago
I work at Stripe, and I'm really very sorry about this. Mind emailing me at anurag@stripe.com with details?
- hellbanner 11y ago
  Does the company have any plans to introduce a ticketing management system?
  - derpsss 11y ago
    Obviously, no.
- disappointeddev 11y ago
  Hello Anurag, I will send you an email shortly.
weego 11y ago
This is pure gamification of the site. So many points for making a baseless statement with a most likely heavily edited version of the events and then get exposure just because DAE companies hate us entrepreneurs Everyone here should know better than this. When I had a problem, I phoned up Stripe and sorted it in minutes. I didn't post on the internet when my business was suffering.
- Pyramids 11y ago
  I'm curious how you phoned them up, as they're quite adamant and public about not offering any sort of phone based point of contact.[1] [1] https://support.stripe.com/questions/do-you-have-a-phone-number-i-can-call https://support.stripe.com/questions/do-you-have-a-phone-num...
hellbanner 11y ago
--PSA regarding Credit Card Validation-- Last year I was testing Stripe integration. I tried using my own credit card with a fake name. Surprise, it went through. I emailed Stripe support. After half a dozen emails discussing CC authorization I learned that Stripe does not and can not validate Name & Address on credit card. Stripe told me that Credit Card companies do not disclose this data to Payment Processors like Stripe. Thus, Stripe simply passes on the name & address to the CC API. Interestingly enough, Name & Address are NOT validated by major credit card companies. You can use junk names on your name & billing address and that will NOT stop your credit card transaction from going through. Try for yourself next time you order something online. Makes me wonder why they even collect the data in the first place...
- mason55 11y ago
  > Last year I was testing Stripe integration. I tried using my own credit card with a fake name. This sounds like a great way to get your account shut down. They provide test/mock APIs for a reason.
  - ghshephard 11y ago
    I'm willing to wager that a huge number of Credit Card transactions are submitted with names that don't match the credit card. In 10+ years and hundreds (thousands?) of transactions, I've never submitted a credit card transaction that matched the name on my card (which has my full name, and I just use my first and last name in the fields) - I've never been rejected.
    - dangrossman 11y ago
      It's the "using my own credit card" that sounds like a great way to get your account shut down, not using it with a fake name. Charging your own cards is something payment processors don't like for a number of reasons, like the fact that it can be used to perpetrate all kinds of frauds: giving yourself cash advances the card issuer hasn't approved, gaming credit card reward programs, skewing your volume and reversal metrics the processor uses to evaluate your account risk, etc.
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gharial 11y ago
I recently reached out to Stripe to get their opinion on whether or not I should bother trying to integrate stripe.js with my browser based game. I obviously didn't want to invest the effort if they were just going to shut me down a few weeks later. It says in their TOU that virtual currency sales are allowed so long as it's self contained and can't be traded for real money or across other websites - that was the case with my game. After over a week of waiting for a reply (PayPal's initial responses are rarely helpful, but at least they tend to respond..), they told me I shouldn't use Stripe because I would almost undoubtably be considered high risk. Why not just say it isn't allowed?
- onewaystreet 11y ago
  They do in their TOS.
  - gharial 11y ago
    https://stripe.com/us/prohibited-businesses https://stripe.com/us/prohibited-businesses >Video game or virtual world credits: Sale of in-game currency unless the merchant is the operator of the virtual world I am. >Virtual currency or stored value: Virtual currency that can be monetized, resold, or converted to physical or digital products and services or otherwise exit the virtual world (e.g., Bitcoin); sale of stored value or credits maintained, accepted and issued by anyone other than the seller It can't and isn't. Their TOS actually makes no mention of virtual currency whatsoever.
    - pki 11y ago
      Game currency purchases that aren't converted or sold are still disgustingly, ridiculously high risk, bordering internet pharmacy level stuff, especially if a lot of under-18 play your game.
      - gharial 11y ago
        Again - then why not just explicitly ban it altogether? Why say it's allowed under certain parameters and then ban users anyway when they meet those parameters exactly as required? They obviously have a list of products/transactions deemed too high-risk by their contract, they need to state what they are explicitly if they want to stop the PR bleeding. I've been doing this for four years and we've never had a single dispute, but that's really neither here nor there.
Danski0 11y ago
After using Stripe for our subscription service for over 1year with 100'000euro+ monthly transcation we got a 10day notice that they would shut us down. Also the mail was send late on friday before a long weekend, yeah! =) No warnings, no chance to appeal, no heads up and absolutly no possiblity to call them. Lost around half a million euros before we could get our customers exported to another payment processor. Thanks Stripe! It's a great service when it works, not so great at customer service.
- kawsper 11y ago
  Did you break their rules? Their terms say that they can cancel your agreement, but only with a 2 months notice: > We can terminate this agreement for any reason on two months’ notice and immediately in certain circumstances Source: https://stripe.com/gb/terms https://stripe.com/gb/terms
  - krisdol 11y ago
    >certain circumstances (such as where you breach this Agreement) It concerns me, as this still gives them full power to terminate the agreement immediately anytime they want. They never define what "certain circumstances" are, rather, they just provide one example. EDIT: I would just like to say that I was mistaken. See the reply to my comment. That said, the US terms differ in an important way.
    - Justsignedup 11y ago
      I wonder if they could be sued for that. IANAL but afaik US contract law states that vagueness in contracts always benefits the party who did not write the contract. The vagueness may be used to your advantage to indicate that they didn't give you the two months you expected.
    - grabeh 11y ago
      If you click 'Complete details' just below you will be provided with a full list of the circumstances in which they can terminate with immediate effect (although I acknowledge that the ability to terminate simply because a card network/issuer requests this is not particularly transparent (but understandable)): - we determine in our sole discretion that you are ineligible for the Service because of the risk associated with your use of Stripe, including without limitation significant credit or fraud risk, or for any other reason; - you do not comply with any of the provisions of this Agreement, or - upon request of a Card Network or a card issuer.
blfr 11y ago
I'm just surprised the handle disappointeddev was still available. Do you sell cheap virtual goods? They're sometimes used to test stolen cards I heard.
manishsharan 11y ago
The one thing that surprises me most is why banks don't provide an payment processing API for their customers. I consult at a top bank in Canada ,and I brought this issue up several times in the online banking division and was met with complete indifference. The middle management ( all PMP certified) dont have the vision and the upper management is busy coasting along. My reasoning was that the bank is already doing a lot of business with the business customers and there is trustful relationship and quite a lot of these customers had some form of online presence ,so helping them with online payment processing would be cheaper for the bank ,given their working relationship. and these businesses would not consider taking their business to competition as that would entail switching costs. Also, fraudulent transaction would be less given the relationship history. But what do I know ? I am just an engineer .
- dangrossman 11y ago
  This is already something every major US and Canadian bank offers. It's called a merchant account. The API for using a merchant account on the web is called a payment gateway. They all offer them. http://www.rbcroyalbank.com/RBC:z7TrmawYUA4BRAAwmCMAAAD8/business/cardprocessing/index.html http://www.rbcroyalbank.com/RBC:z7TrmawYUA4BRAAwmCMAAAD8/bus... http://www.tdcanadatrust.com/products-services/small-business/merchant-services/ http://www.tdcanadatrust.com/products-services/small-busines... http://www.scotiabank.com/ca/en/0,,557,00.html http://www.scotiabank.com/ca/en/0,,557,00.html https://www.bmoharris.com/us/small-business/services/merchant-services https://www.bmoharris.com/us/small-business/services/merchan... https://www.cibc.com/ca/small-business/merchant-services.html https://www.cibc.com/ca/small-business/merchant-services.htm...
  - manishsharan 11y ago
    Actually no they don't : atleast not in the way paypal or Stripe et al do. I have had meetings with some their "small business advisors" and and I ran screaming to Stripe. Getting and using Interac device and connection was simple enough but their solution for online payment processing will set your hair on fire.
paulhauggis 11y ago
..Or the new Google..or the new Amazon. Both of the above companies have nearly 100% automated responses. With Amazon, if you get your selling account put on hold for any reason (even if it's by mistake through their automated bots), you will not be able to talk to anyone on the phone or through email. Your account is also put on hold for 90 days and your money might get transferred back to you when they feel like it. It happened to me a few years back. A customer was ordering merchandise, stealing it, and filing disputes with Amazon. I wasn't able to block the customer, because it's not possible with their current system. Support was unhelpful (automated copy/paste responses) and they pretty much sided with the customer every time and deemed my account a "threat". Before this, 100% feedback. It's a good lesson to learn: Don't base your business on one companym because they might just pull it out from under you one day.
- akhatri_aus 11y ago
  Except Google and Amazon's primary customers are consumers. Amazon's customer support is quite good afaik, at least if you're on the buying end. Stripe is a B2B business it's also a bit 'lower layer'. You would have to rely on them for your business quite heavily.
  - wmf 11y ago
    I guess this is the endpoint of "consumerized" B2B. Slick UI, very easy to use, low pricing, no support.
  - paulhauggis 11y ago
    Many 3rd party sellers rely on Amazon for their business. It also makes up a large percentage of Amazon's profits. The same with Google. How many people use Adsense, Adwords, Analytics for their business? If you want any sort of tech business these days, it's hard to avoid.
tptacek 11y ago
If every time a company popular on HN did something that one HN user found inexplicable we had a top-of-the-front-page story about it, the front page would be nothing but complaints. An "Ask HN" would make more sense, since that would (a) generate information instead of just broadcasting a complaint, and (b) reveal whether there was a trend behind it. I flagged this story, and hope other people will too.
- jbrooksuk 11y ago
  With all due respect, take a quick look through the replies, there are a lot of "I experienced this too" comments. If you go further and search HN you'll see that this tends to be a common problem with Stripe support. I think that this type of post is fine for HN. It's a YCombinator backed company, with the founders and most of the team commonly browsing the site and people here are usually able to point you in the right direction.
  - rgbrenner 11y ago
    It's a YCombinator backed company, with the founders and most of the team commonly browsing the site and people here are usually able to point you in the right direction. That's understandable.. but this isn't a support forum, and people would stop visiting if it became one.
    - jbrooksuk 11y ago
      In most circumstances that'd be fine, but as the OP states, he's tried getting in touch with them. This is essentially the last resort.
- stephengillie 11y ago
  Can one HN user, working alone, get something on the front page? I thought it took multiple votes. It's almost like you're arguing against accountability and transparency. Should posts about HN companies not show up on HN, and instead be written about on a different website? Maybe BusinessInsider or Bloomberg? It's true that many will upvote it merely because an HN company was mentioned, but like the other response says, there are many "me too"s in this thread.
fasteo 11y ago
This is pretty useless. You should give some context. Using a disposable HN account does not help either.
kawsper 11y ago
I tried to help a business that received the exact same message as you. They had $7.500 on their account. We eventually gave up, as no one from Stripe answered with other than pre-written answers. I even tried pinging them on IRC, but they couldn't help with these matters. They had no disputes, and Stripe provided no reason for the cancellation.
kitbrennan 11y ago
As mentioned by many others - there are a number of details missing here that are extremely relevant. What are you selling? Where? To whom? If you had hundreds of charges in your first month, did you migrate over from another payment supplier or are they brand new customers? If you migrated, how did you migrate? I used to work on fraud operations at a payment processor and there was always more to the story. There were four categories that account's broadly fell into: * The quiet fraudster. These would either have a scam business model with real victims attempting to pay, or would not have a business and were using stolen payment details to pay themselves. The quiet fraudster would not argue when you closed their account - they would just sign up again and try a different approach to get round your system. * The loud fraudster (the vast majority of fraudsters). These come in all shapes and sizes. They were often the most obvious frauds (100 payments from the same IP at our max payment amount, within 10 minutes of each other). Unfortunately they sometimes came in the form of someone deluded - for example the man that sold 'magic beans' that cured AIDS. These are the loud fraudsters because they will either shout down the phone at your support team (shouting never helps when calling support - by the way), or try and drum up negative PR to create pressure. * The accidental fraudster. These people have good intentions, but are none-the-less breaking the rules. For example, migrating all of your customers over to a new payment supplier by filling out a new payment form on their behalf (note - I worked for a payment processor that was not based on cards - this method may be allowed for CC though I doubt it). The accidental fraudster might also have fraudulent customers paying them yet be a legit business - for example online sellers of jewellery will have a lot of people pay with stolen details hoping that the business will ship the goods before the payment is flagged. Sometimes you can work with the business to fix the issue, many times you have to let them go (remember, they will have all the signs of an obvious fraudster - so you have to be sure that their story is true). * The innocent. As you can imagine, sometimes there are people that have all the signs of a fraudster yet are perfectly legitimate. There can be many reasons for this. === Without a lot more information, I cannot begin to speculate what category the author falls into - hopefully one of the latter two. That said, as much as I love what Stripe in general, it is completely unacceptable for them not to have an escalated support/appeals process for fraud complaints. If they have made a mistake (which happens even with the best fraud systems), then they could be destroying a business that might have customers/employees/suppliers that are also relying on them to receive their payments on time.
bargl 11y ago
Can we please all take a look at disapointeddev's account and use just a little bit of salt here? Just one grain maybe? His account was obviously activated for the purpose of submitting this post and he has provided NO follow up comments at this time. His post has been up for an hour. I'm not saying anything about the validity of his claim, but we obviously need more information. Please check back and wait for him to respond to the many great questions already on here.
- disappointeddev 11y ago
  As I said, I will be writing a more lengthy blog post about this. The only reason I posted this on HN is because I want Stripe to give me attention and solve the problem. I love Stripe's API which is why I want them to solve the issue. Also, I made a new account for my privacy.
  - bargl 11y ago
    Thanks for replying. I'd like it if you could link to the blog after you've finished writing it, but if you don't want to for privacy purposes I get that. I just see people running off in a million directions in the comments on HN and it's nice to wait and let things play out a little before we jump on any bandwagons, this is an event that requires a follow up to be a complete story. So please also follow up with your experience with Stripe after coming to this forum (through link to your blog or in the comments or an edit). I'm sure we'd all like to get the complete story.
    - sdalfakj 11y ago
      > let things play out a little Dude will be losing money while you get your popcorn ;)
gdulli 11y ago
Every time I see a post like this it makes me wonder if other businesses have unfairly gotten a bad reputation because of anecdotes reported by anonymous customers whose version of the story is subjective, biased, possibly exaggerated, etc. When a company is huge, even one out of 100,000 transactions going badly adds up to a lot of anecdotes.
- yc1010 11y ago
  In case of PayPal the bad reputation is deserved In case of Stripe i sent last week a question in reply to an email from them from last year, there is no ticketing system it seems I got replies from 2 different people today after a week (not the same person one who originally was friendly and talked to me and might not be working there). Both answers were somewhat positive but a bit contradictory. I do not believe that Stripe are fundamentally "evil" like PayPal, well not yet anyways we will see how turns out with more growth and more staff who might not care about customers.
AC__ 11y ago
All of these payments services are going to die within 5 years anyway. Before people get all pissy and down vote this assertion let me you remind you that a massive(and growing) portion of the world has become completely disillusioned with the global fiat currency system(or perhaps just enlightened as to how it works?), regardless, its days are numbered. I am not however entirely convinced that cryptocurrencies, namely bitcoin, aren't in fact a creation of global financiers anticipating rejection of the fiat currency model, but fuck it we'll see.
- Aloha 11y ago
  This holds about as much water as a colander. Show me a survey show this supposed massive disillusionment with fiat currency.
  - AC__ 11y ago
    Umm what about entire countries...Iceland...Greece.
    - thoughtpolice 11y ago
      You didn't answer his question as to where this 'clear mass disillusionment' is. Where is the actual proof fiat is on the way out?
    - task_queue 11y ago
      How are you twisting debt crises into a pitch for Bitcoin, the most centralized, 100% traceable and accountable crypto-currency on the net?
    - Aloha 11y ago
      In both Iceland and Greece you saw a massive loss of trust with the existing government (both since replaced democratically)- that has nothing to do with peoples faith in their currency, as you've not seen a real call in either place to go back to a specie backed currency. In Greece there have been calls to go back to the Drachma - but this doesn't mean a lack of faith in fiat currency, the greeks seem to more want out of the EU currency union then anything else.
Osiris 11y ago
I use the MinFraud service from MaxMind to try to avoid unauthorized transactions. Using Braintree, I first do an Authorization, if that goes through, I send details to MinFraud. If that passes a threshold, then I submit the payment for settlement. If not, I void the transaction. This process has helped to avoid all kinds of scammers using my website to try to validate stolen credit card details.
- jonathancordeau 11y ago
  Maybe you should build it. YC RFS Maybe? https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/ https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/
- walterbell 11y ago
  How much does this cost?
- egillie 11y ago
  How did you like it? Have you looked at Sift Science, by any chance?
amelius 11y ago
Why isn't there a standard way of filing complaints against a company and/or discussing them online? It would be so helpful if a consumer could just go to www.company.com, and click on a "discuss website" or "complain" button in the browser.
pc 11y ago
Stripe CEO here. I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm taking a look at what happened here. OP (disappointeddev), if you could drop me an email, that'd be great: patrick@stripe.com.
- disappointeddev 11y ago
  Sent!
  - s_dev 11y ago
    We expect follow up posts if everything gets sorted - even if it embarrasses you or Stripe a little bit.
    - s_dev 11y ago
      Disappointed Dev Update after 24 Hours: "After speaking with Stripe I have decided to end our dealings. Unfortunately the issue could not be resolved. We are looking at alternate providers."
- jeffmould 11y ago
  This response alone is why I will always recommend Stripe. The support may need support of its own, but knowing that you can get management's attention fairly easily says a lot of great things about the company and the people working there in my book.
  - GuiA 11y ago
    Yeah, except not every Stripe customer knows that the real place to get support is (apparently) Hacker News, rather than Stripe support. The fact that the official channels are non responsive but a post on HN gets an immediate response could be construed as a red flag: the company cares more about avoiding bad PR than about having good customer service.
    - pc 11y ago
gukov 11y ago
Good to know, but is there anyone that's better right now?
christop 11y ago
Reminds me of this tangentially-related comment from jwz a few days ago: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2015/06/internet-commerce-how-does-it-fucking-work/#comment-162859 http://www.jwz.org/blog/2015/06/internet-commerce-how-does-i...
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joshdance 11y ago
TLDR - One devs account was shut down. He wants support and is getting it in the comments.
jdc0589 11y ago
Full disclosure, we are still in the implementation stage with Stripe, nothing in production yet, but customer service has been excellent so far. Sure, it's non-traditional, and I think they need a better user facing ticket system especially for important things that need tracking + accountability. Every time I have had a question about functionality, needed someone to take a look at test cases in my account, etc.., someone from Stripe has ALWAYS been available in IRC and quick to respond. That said, if they really are canceling accounts on short notice, that's pretty shitty. No reasonable sized application can realistically swap to a completely new payment provider in a week. There should be a bare minimum of a month or two of notice if your account is getting terminated.
holdenc 11y ago
It's worth noting: if you do 100K+ monthly via PayPal, you get a VIP support team for all business issues, and a Christmas card with their faces printed on the front. No kidding.
- pestaa 11y ago
  That's actually a surprisingly nice gesture. I have a feeling that PayPal may be able to rebuild the trust it lost in hacker minds.
- hamburglar 11y ago
  It's actually quite a bit lower than 100K. My company does about $20K/mo with PayPal and we have an assigned account rep who we contact directly for support. I don't think they've ever sent us a Christmas card, though. Maybe that's the difference between $20K and $100K. :)
anotherangrydev 11y ago
Just my 2¢. I create custom web commerce solutions for a few small/medium businesses in Mexico. Ever since Stripe launched a few years ago I wanted to try them out but, as expected, they were not available yet here. Still, I subscribed to their 'mailing list' in order to be notified whenever they would launch. Last year, I've heard that they were about to do it and eventually announced the market as 'Beta', whatever that means. Again, I subscribed to their list, this time, in order to be 'invited for their private beta'. I'm pretty sure I was at the top of their list, because back then not many people knew about stripe and further, less people from Mexico were interested with them; tbh, nowadays Stripe is something that you don't hear in the field in Mexico, at all. To this day I haven't heard from them, and for what I see Stripe here in Mexico operates more like some kind of secret society than a real business. My point is, I'm not doing business with them, and the reason is that it is clear that they're not here to offer a payment solution for developers in general, they are just here to hang out and provide the payment backbone for a few of their friends, and that's it. Even if I'm later deemed 'worthy of their attention', I won't integrate their payments platform with any kind of serious project that I would develop, and the reason is that they will always look at me as 'just another guy' and whenever I come up with some real problem that would need their attention they would just check out their A-list, realize that my name is not there and pretty much let me fuck up; just like it's doing it with many of the other guys that are posting here. For the moment I'll stick with PayU which I think is, by the way, a much better payment platform than Stripe if you take out all the 'pay with a single JSON Curl' fanfare. TL;DR: Ignoring your actual clients is the worst PR ever.
DINKDINK 11y ago
>So how could it be true that the payments are unauthorised? It could be no fault of your own but maybe your customers are using stolen credit cards.
beat 11y ago
Fraud is an incredibly difficult problem for payment processors, for both technical and business reasons. It's well worth studying if you're into this sort of thing. Fraud is a sensitivity/specificity problem. For sensitivity, Stripe wants to detect as many actual fraud cases as possible, because undetected fraud is expensive. For specificity, they want as few false positives as possible, because false positives mean angry customers who feel mistreated. Generally, there's a sensitivity/specificity tradeoff, and priorities need to be set (which is worse - letting criminals get away, or frustrating honest customers?). But at such a scale, and with so many creative minds working on new mechanisms for fraud, it's impossible to achieve perfect numbers on either side.
natemc 11y ago
Stripe is a Ycombinator company. I got downvoted when I told the CEO of Stripe my troubles with Stripe, he said to email but then never responded creating the public perception that they care, when they don't. You will just find downvoting brigades of people on HN when it comes to any YC backed company. Which is probably why this will be my last post on HN. You can't get anything truthful on here if YC has backed them.
- vonklaus 11y ago
  > Which is probably why this will be my last post on HN It is pretty great that the CEO comes on HN and handles support. That is a skip-level meeting. Usually support requests are handled at the bottom of the heirarchy pyramid, not the top. Yes people openly support and defend YC companies, this community is only possible because of YC, and is comprised of many employees, founders and peers of these companies. If you don't like being disagreed with though, you can pick up your ball and go home. I suspect that you will get a lot more value from this community than the one time you couldn't get a CEO to directly address your problems.
  - velik_m 11y ago
    CEO is not handling support, he's handling PR
edem 11y ago
I will not use Stripe's services while I see these support issues cropping up.
djmollusk 11y ago
I've had no problems getting responses back from Stripe. Glad to see the CEO responded. Please please please don't become PayPal!
ygmelnikova 11y ago
A couple of days ago, Stripe gave one of our clients 14 days to 'switch their website over to a new provider' accusing them of selling 'pseudo-pharmaceuticals' when I know for a fact they do no such thing. It seems to be 'shoot first, and don't bother asking any questions'. Thing is, as a developer I spent a year trying to convince them to switch from their current payment gateway to Stripe. This particular client has been in business for a long time, and does $300K+ per month in sales. They have over 25,000 satisfied customers and zero BBB or other complaints. Needless to say, Stripe has given our company a black eye.
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spdustin 11y ago
Wouldn't it help in a lot of cases to have an automatic escalation system in place, via SLA rules or other triggers, to raise up the visibility of messages from people whose accounts are being shut down? Have it post to IRC, Slack, PagerDuty, etc. when an email comes in from a customer flagged as "account closing by administrative action" or whatever?
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gravanom 11y ago
Huh, and here I am just finalizing my application for Stripe's "user ops" support crew.
- pbreit 11y ago
  Congrats, it's a great company.
disappointeddev 11y ago
Update: After speaking with Stripe I have decided to end our dealings. Unfortunately the issue could not be resolved. We are looking at alternate providers.
- bornabox 11y ago
  Could you explain with some details? I'd be quite interested in understanding what happened, and I imagine others would too.
- dear 11y ago
  Elaborate please?
- jordanthoms 11y ago
  When you are vague and refuse to elaborate, it can only lead us to think that your business isn't as squeaky clean as you make out.
  - developer1 11y ago
    I believe you meant to say "it proves your business isn't as squeaky clean as you make out". With a response like that, clearly their business was operating in some kind of grey area. It's unfortunate that when this happens, the company (ex: Stripe) can't come back and disclose specific details about the scumbag making a stink on HackerNews over something that the company was perfectly in the right to shut down. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses want to accept credit cards online with little to no effort in managing the risk. 1-2% doesn't sound like enough wiggle room, but if a company isn't using misleading marketing, is not defrauding users, has a product actually worth what they are charging, and offers instant support for refunds - then staying under 2% is not difficult. Too many businesses want the risk to be handled by external forces. If you want to accept money online, make sure your business is prepared to manage the risks. You can't just drop in the payment processing and wait for the money to roll in.
GBond 11y ago
Is it me of posting/commenting on HN has become the default method of resolving a Stripe issue when all normal channels fail?
fndrplayer13 11y ago
What was the end result of your discussion with the CEO? Was everything resolved?

elliotec 11y ago

Scary. I was hoping they'd remain the oasis in the harsh desert of online payment systems.

dangrossman 11y ago

What were you selling, how and to whom? I feel like there's probably more to this.

happyscrappy 11y ago
It is quite likely that certain outrage deflating details were left out. Stripe and Paypal are polar opposites in my experience.
- onion2k 11y ago
  "I've had a good experience with Stripe so everyone must have unless it was their fault" is a good example of the Halo Effect. It's entirely possible that Stripe have failed one of their customers without it being the customer's fault. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect
  - happyscrappy 11y ago
    I said "quite likely" not "must have" which makes your argument very weak.
- hluska 11y ago
  I'm trying hard to read your words, but I can't stop noticing your username and having Clerks flashbacks. Have a great day - you (inadvertently) started mine with a good laugh! :)
jusben1369 11y ago
I feel like this was the key part: "This makes no sense as I have had hundreds of payments and not a single payment has been disputed. So how could it be true that the payments are unauthorised?" Disputed and Unauthorized are two very different things - especially with the time frame of less than a month. It would have been much more convincing if he'd said "I've had hundreds of payments and all have been authorized by the end user" I suspect there's some sort of crowd funding element but either way shall wait to see what the blog post says.

gt565k 11y ago

In all honesty you probably got stuck in some automated loop. It is kind of sad that the support isn't more expedited for things like this. Seems like more and more people are turning to HN in order to get visibility and get their Stripe problems resolved. That is quite unfortunate... I upvoted for visibility, as I know how frustrating it is to deal with payment processors, especially when your living / business depends on it.

minimaxir 11y ago

> So how could it be true that the payments are unauthorised? Stolen cards, for instance, which may be more likely to happen in some industries than others. While I understand the need for ambiguity with respect to your business operations, this post is too vague to give any understanding as to why Stripe blocked your account.

mangeletti 11y ago
I think the ambiguity is transitive, and is the primary point of the OP, coupled with the lack of support received from Stripe thereafter.
weego 11y ago
The post talks about unauthorised charges. There is no way to validate the card prior to Stripe capturing payment, so they certainly are not upset about people using stolen cards on your own site, as you have no way of mitigating that. The migration to Stripe that I handled a year or so ago had 5 or 6 stolen cards/people iterating card lists looking for working cards per day and never had a complaint from Stripe. Once you have a card you can absolutely take arbitrary amounts of money from it, and this appears to be their suggestion. It could well be that they are using (purposely) vague wording that confuses people about their charging structure (in one off payments or subscriptions) which generates complaints to banks and then Stripe have to deal with it. Or it could be a big misunderstanding Stripe side and they have done nothing wrong. I have an opinion on which one I think is most likely.
- ChuckMcM 11y ago
  Sort of. Some products are real magnets for stolen card use, for example anything that sells "gift cards" or "stored value card" where the crooks can convert a one time use of a stolen credit card into a 'clean' gift card. Some forms of merchandise are similar.
  - mootothemax 11y ago
    Some products are real magnets for stolen card use Charities also have huge problems with CC fraud, as they're seen as an easy target to test card details against before making the "full" purchase elsewhere: http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/stolen-cards-tested-on-charity-sites-a-7608/op-1 http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/stolen-cards-tested-on-chari...

jeffmould 11y ago

Someone else posted last night (I'm on my phone or I would search for the post) about Stripe support. Looking at their Twitter stream it appears they are having a very difficult time managing their support infrastructure and do not have a trouble ticket system. I love Stripe's API and have helped several clients integrate it, but as the developer-friendly, anti-PayPal processor they were once known for, this development is very discouraging. I know Patrick and John are active on here so hopefully they will see this and come up with a solution.

woodhull 11y ago
We've run into this as well. It's absurd that a company of their size has no support ticketing system. There have been occasions when we've had to rely on personal relationships with staff at Stripe to simply get an email response to our account questions. Engineering support is great and responsive through IRC but, stripe engineering staff there just shrug if you ask a business question.
- jeffmould 11y ago
  Their engineering support is incredible, and their API is well-documented and so easy to integrate. It is hard to believe that they can't spend a little more time focusing on customer support, especially as they continue to add new features and countries the problem is only going to increase. At least adding a public-facing ticketing system would pull some pressure off. I don't necessarily mind waiting for support, it is the not knowing if you even received my support request that can be frustrating at times, especially when there are real dollars at stake.
  - jusben1369 11y ago
    I think one thing that is not well understood is that Stripe has a "Freemium" model. Prior to Stripe nearly all other payment processors required a minimum monthly fee. Stripe's lack of any minimum monthly fee is something that makes it very attractive and undoubtedly helped partly fuel their rapid growth. It's a great example of how you can leverage VC funding to build a business. Having said that it must mean a staggering amount of support emails from customers in "production". That developer doing just 1 or 3 transactions a month at $100 each still feels as strongly about getting an issue resolved as someone doing $1 million or $10 million a month. I've always wondered what that was like to manage.

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brandall10 11y ago
Err... https://stripe.com/docs/api#disputes https://stripe.com/docs/api#disputes
wrong_internet 11y ago
You are likely not a Stripe customer, because this is patently false. They forward all disputed charges to you and give you a window to provide evidence that the dispute is invalid.
leesalminen 11y ago
Right, and then the credit card company sends that information to the merchant via the gateway (Stripe). See: https://stripe.com/help/disputes-overview https://stripe.com/help/disputes-overview

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toxican 11y ago
>I am only writing this post because Stripe are not responding to my emails.
ad_hominem 11y ago
Stripe's CEO left his email here after the last kerfuffle and I never got a response to my emailed question.

ShirsenduK 11y ago

Have you tweeted to them?

roosterjm2k2 11y ago
The fact that this is a valid reply saddens me...
- timboslice 11y ago
  Right? This is the financial industry, you shouldn't have to "publicly shame" a company to get a response. A ticketing system would give some organization to the chaos
  - eertami 11y ago
    Hell, I shouldn't have to register for a twitter account to be able to contact someone in any industry.
  - ShirsenduK 11y ago
    I wish we lived in a world where people actually did what they signed up for. Buy unfortunately we have machines who follow that rule. I came on Twitter very late and it was basically to shame and acknowledged good publicity.
- giarc 11y ago
  It's very true. I recently had an issue with Expedia and was getting no where with phone or email support. I simply tweeted their public account with 140 chars of details and boom, they had "coincidentally" updated their TOS which meant my issue was now resolvable.

exelius 11y ago

This is what happens when you replace business relationships with APIs. APIs should complement a business relationship, not replace it.

hharnisch 11y ago

Have you tried tweeting at them? https://twitter.com/stripe/ https://twitter.com/stripe/ They're way more responsive over twitter than email.

deadmik3 11y ago
You shouldn't have to publicly tweet at a company about an issue regarding your bank accounts/debit cards to get their attention though
- hharnisch 11y ago
  You don't have to, they accept DMs from people they don't follow.

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kevinchen 11y ago
My school tracks tickets with ServiceNow extensively and it's one of the worst pieces of software I've ever used. If you want enterprise, at least use JIRA Service Desk. They actually tried to design a good UI.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- DortchOnIT 11y ago
  Um...ServiceNow includes a content management system and other features intended to make UI design very flexible, as I recall. So maybe your issues are more with the particular UI with which you're interacting, and not the underlying ServiceNow platform. Just a thought...
giarc 11y ago
When getting downvotes, the worst thing you can do is edit and ask why you are getting downvotes. That typically results in more downvotes.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- Diamons 11y ago
  Why is that, and why are you supporting such sheer stupidity?
  - giarc 11y ago
    I think it's just a culture of "You shouldn't care about upvotes/downvotes, and editing your post to complain/gripe about receiving downvotes indicates you care way too much about them." Likely comes from reddit. Also, I'm not supporting it, not sure why you thought I was.

lnanek2 11y ago

Kind of reminds me of doing business with Google. Most times they ban you it is just a robot that has no clue it is wrong. They just set the thresholds ridiculously high and put up with false positives intentionally as a business choice. Throwing out some innocents is worth it to them to throw out anyone faking clicks or whatnot.

josefresco 11y ago

Square might be the new PayPal in that they're (finally) big enough to have banks breathing down their neck. Honestly, I think the hate is misplaced (for both Square and PP), and should be directed towards the banks who have pushed the security burden upon these tech providers.

wehadfun 11y ago

Something similar happened https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9619282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9619282

mseebach 11y ago

Pick two: - Strongly regulated banks/strong consumer protection in financial services. - Good merchant customer service. - Cheap credit card processing.

stephengillie 11y ago
Security/Convenience/Price Security and Convenience are a classic tradeoff. I suppose you could argue that a good implementation of either isn't cheap.
ianhawes 11y ago
Stripe hardly qualifies as "Cheap credit card processing".

johnnyg 11y ago

We've been with Stripe going on a year and a half and they've been one of the most responsive and with it service providers I've ever worked with. Can you tell us how long it has been since you sent the email? There must be some level of fraud prevention in any financial platform. You didn't give many details as to the type of charges you made or evidence past "no one charged back" as to how you made them. This is a public platform and I understand less than full disclosure but your narrative that: 1. You signed up 2. You charged people legitimately 3. You were cut off without notice 4. No one responded to multiple attempts over more than 1 business day 5. You were forced to take this action Seems unlikely to be the full and absolute time line of events. If it is, ok, post to HN and troll them. If not, is this really the medium? Doesn't stripe get a say on which transactions will and won't process on their own network? If your expectation is "everything charges all the time period" then use bitcoin. These are credit cards. There are rules. :-)

timboslice 11y ago
I think you forgot a word: >Doesn't stripe get a some say on which transactions will and won't their own network?
- johnnyg 11y ago
  Sorry for the typo, updated.
mootothemax 11y ago
Seems unlikely to be the full and absolute time line of events. Ironically, we've seen this before with the many complaints about PayPal. While I'm open to the idea we're getting the full story here, I think your view may turn out to the right one.
task_queue 11y ago
> Seems unlikely to be the full and absolute time line of events. Credit card processors do this all the time.

anurag 11y ago

I work at Stripe, and I'm really very sorry about this. Mind emailing me at anurag@stripe.com with details?

hellbanner 11y ago
Does the company have any plans to introduce a ticketing management system?
- derpsss 11y ago
  Obviously, no.
disappointeddev 11y ago
Hello Anurag, I will send you an email shortly.

weego 11y ago

This is pure gamification of the site. So many points for making a baseless statement with a most likely heavily edited version of the events and then get exposure just because DAE companies hate us entrepreneurs Everyone here should know better than this. When I had a problem, I phoned up Stripe and sorted it in minutes. I didn't post on the internet when my business was suffering.

Pyramids 11y ago
I'm curious how you phoned them up, as they're quite adamant and public about not offering any sort of phone based point of contact.[1] [1] https://support.stripe.com/questions/do-you-have-a-phone-number-i-can-call https://support.stripe.com/questions/do-you-have-a-phone-num...

hellbanner 11y ago

--PSA regarding Credit Card Validation-- Last year I was testing Stripe integration. I tried using my own credit card with a fake name. Surprise, it went through. I emailed Stripe support. After half a dozen emails discussing CC authorization I learned that Stripe does not and can not validate Name & Address on credit card. Stripe told me that Credit Card companies do not disclose this data to Payment Processors like Stripe. Thus, Stripe simply passes on the name & address to the CC API. Interestingly enough, Name & Address are NOT validated by major credit card companies. You can use junk names on your name & billing address and that will NOT stop your credit card transaction from going through. Try for yourself next time you order something online. Makes me wonder why they even collect the data in the first place...

mason55 11y ago
> Last year I was testing Stripe integration. I tried using my own credit card with a fake name. This sounds like a great way to get your account shut down. They provide test/mock APIs for a reason.
- ghshephard 11y ago
  I'm willing to wager that a huge number of Credit Card transactions are submitted with names that don't match the credit card. In 10+ years and hundreds (thousands?) of transactions, I've never submitted a credit card transaction that matched the name on my card (which has my full name, and I just use my first and last name in the fields) - I've never been rejected.
  - dangrossman 11y ago
    It's the "using my own credit card" that sounds like a great way to get your account shut down, not using it with a fake name. Charging your own cards is something payment processors don't like for a number of reasons, like the fact that it can be used to perpetrate all kinds of frauds: giving yourself cash advances the card issuer hasn't approved, gaming credit card reward programs, skewing your volume and reversal metrics the processor uses to evaluate your account risk, etc.

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gharial 11y ago

I recently reached out to Stripe to get their opinion on whether or not I should bother trying to integrate stripe.js with my browser based game. I obviously didn't want to invest the effort if they were just going to shut me down a few weeks later. It says in their TOU that virtual currency sales are allowed so long as it's self contained and can't be traded for real money or across other websites - that was the case with my game. After over a week of waiting for a reply (PayPal's initial responses are rarely helpful, but at least they tend to respond..), they told me I shouldn't use Stripe because I would almost undoubtably be considered high risk. Why not just say it isn't allowed?

onewaystreet 11y ago
They do in their TOS.
- gharial 11y ago
  https://stripe.com/us/prohibited-businesses https://stripe.com/us/prohibited-businesses >Video game or virtual world credits: Sale of in-game currency unless the merchant is the operator of the virtual world I am. >Virtual currency or stored value: Virtual currency that can be monetized, resold, or converted to physical or digital products and services or otherwise exit the virtual world (e.g., Bitcoin); sale of stored value or credits maintained, accepted and issued by anyone other than the seller It can't and isn't. Their TOS actually makes no mention of virtual currency whatsoever.
  - pki 11y ago
    Game currency purchases that aren't converted or sold are still disgustingly, ridiculously high risk, bordering internet pharmacy level stuff, especially if a lot of under-18 play your game.
    - gharial 11y ago
      Again - then why not just explicitly ban it altogether? Why say it's allowed under certain parameters and then ban users anyway when they meet those parameters exactly as required? They obviously have a list of products/transactions deemed too high-risk by their contract, they need to state what they are explicitly if they want to stop the PR bleeding. I've been doing this for four years and we've never had a single dispute, but that's really neither here nor there.

Danski0 11y ago

After using Stripe for our subscription service for over 1year with 100'000euro+ monthly transcation we got a 10day notice that they would shut us down. Also the mail was send late on friday before a long weekend, yeah! =) No warnings, no chance to appeal, no heads up and absolutly no possiblity to call them. Lost around half a million euros before we could get our customers exported to another payment processor. Thanks Stripe! It's a great service when it works, not so great at customer service.

kawsper 11y ago
Did you break their rules? Their terms say that they can cancel your agreement, but only with a 2 months notice: > We can terminate this agreement for any reason on two months’ notice and immediately in certain circumstances Source: https://stripe.com/gb/terms https://stripe.com/gb/terms
- krisdol 11y ago
  >certain circumstances (such as where you breach this Agreement) It concerns me, as this still gives them full power to terminate the agreement immediately anytime they want. They never define what "certain circumstances" are, rather, they just provide one example. EDIT: I would just like to say that I was mistaken. See the reply to my comment. That said, the US terms differ in an important way.
  - Justsignedup 11y ago
    I wonder if they could be sued for that. IANAL but afaik US contract law states that vagueness in contracts always benefits the party who did not write the contract. The vagueness may be used to your advantage to indicate that they didn't give you the two months you expected.
  - grabeh 11y ago
    If you click 'Complete details' just below you will be provided with a full list of the circumstances in which they can terminate with immediate effect (although I acknowledge that the ability to terminate simply because a card network/issuer requests this is not particularly transparent (but understandable)): - we determine in our sole discretion that you are ineligible for the Service because of the risk associated with your use of Stripe, including without limitation significant credit or fraud risk, or for any other reason; - you do not comply with any of the provisions of this Agreement, or - upon request of a Card Network or a card issuer.

blfr 11y ago

I'm just surprised the handle disappointeddev was still available. Do you sell cheap virtual goods? They're sometimes used to test stolen cards I heard.

manishsharan 11y ago

The one thing that surprises me most is why banks don't provide an payment processing API for their customers. I consult at a top bank in Canada ,and I brought this issue up several times in the online banking division and was met with complete indifference. The middle management ( all PMP certified) dont have the vision and the upper management is busy coasting along. My reasoning was that the bank is already doing a lot of business with the business customers and there is trustful relationship and quite a lot of these customers had some form of online presence ,so helping them with online payment processing would be cheaper for the bank ,given their working relationship. and these businesses would not consider taking their business to competition as that would entail switching costs. Also, fraudulent transaction would be less given the relationship history. But what do I know ? I am just an engineer .

dangrossman 11y ago
This is already something every major US and Canadian bank offers. It's called a merchant account. The API for using a merchant account on the web is called a payment gateway. They all offer them. http://www.rbcroyalbank.com/RBC:z7TrmawYUA4BRAAwmCMAAAD8/business/cardprocessing/index.html http://www.rbcroyalbank.com/RBC:z7TrmawYUA4BRAAwmCMAAAD8/bus... http://www.tdcanadatrust.com/products-services/small-business/merchant-services/ http://www.tdcanadatrust.com/products-services/small-busines... http://www.scotiabank.com/ca/en/0,,557,00.html http://www.scotiabank.com/ca/en/0,,557,00.html https://www.bmoharris.com/us/small-business/services/merchant-services https://www.bmoharris.com/us/small-business/services/merchan... https://www.cibc.com/ca/small-business/merchant-services.html https://www.cibc.com/ca/small-business/merchant-services.htm...
- manishsharan 11y ago
  Actually no they don't : atleast not in the way paypal or Stripe et al do. I have had meetings with some their "small business advisors" and and I ran screaming to Stripe. Getting and using Interac device and connection was simple enough but their solution for online payment processing will set your hair on fire.

paulhauggis 11y ago

..Or the new Google..or the new Amazon. Both of the above companies have nearly 100% automated responses. With Amazon, if you get your selling account put on hold for any reason (even if it's by mistake through their automated bots), you will not be able to talk to anyone on the phone or through email. Your account is also put on hold for 90 days and your money might get transferred back to you when they feel like it. It happened to me a few years back. A customer was ordering merchandise, stealing it, and filing disputes with Amazon. I wasn't able to block the customer, because it's not possible with their current system. Support was unhelpful (automated copy/paste responses) and they pretty much sided with the customer every time and deemed my account a "threat". Before this, 100% feedback. It's a good lesson to learn: Don't base your business on one companym because they might just pull it out from under you one day.

akhatri_aus 11y ago
Except Google and Amazon's primary customers are consumers. Amazon's customer support is quite good afaik, at least if you're on the buying end. Stripe is a B2B business it's also a bit 'lower layer'. You would have to rely on them for your business quite heavily.
- wmf 11y ago
  I guess this is the endpoint of "consumerized" B2B. Slick UI, very easy to use, low pricing, no support.
- paulhauggis 11y ago
  Many 3rd party sellers rely on Amazon for their business. It also makes up a large percentage of Amazon's profits. The same with Google. How many people use Adsense, Adwords, Analytics for their business? If you want any sort of tech business these days, it's hard to avoid.

tptacek 11y ago

If every time a company popular on HN did something that one HN user found inexplicable we had a top-of-the-front-page story about it, the front page would be nothing but complaints. An "Ask HN" would make more sense, since that would (a) generate information instead of just broadcasting a complaint, and (b) reveal whether there was a trend behind it. I flagged this story, and hope other people will too.

jbrooksuk 11y ago
With all due respect, take a quick look through the replies, there are a lot of "I experienced this too" comments. If you go further and search HN you'll see that this tends to be a common problem with Stripe support. I think that this type of post is fine for HN. It's a YCombinator backed company, with the founders and most of the team commonly browsing the site and people here are usually able to point you in the right direction.
- rgbrenner 11y ago
  It's a YCombinator backed company, with the founders and most of the team commonly browsing the site and people here are usually able to point you in the right direction. That's understandable.. but this isn't a support forum, and people would stop visiting if it became one.
  - jbrooksuk 11y ago
    In most circumstances that'd be fine, but as the OP states, he's tried getting in touch with them. This is essentially the last resort.
stephengillie 11y ago
Can one HN user, working alone, get something on the front page? I thought it took multiple votes. It's almost like you're arguing against accountability and transparency. Should posts about HN companies not show up on HN, and instead be written about on a different website? Maybe BusinessInsider or Bloomberg? It's true that many will upvote it merely because an HN company was mentioned, but like the other response says, there are many "me too"s in this thread.

fasteo 11y ago

This is pretty useless. You should give some context. Using a disposable HN account does not help either.

kawsper 11y ago

I tried to help a business that received the exact same message as you. They had $7.500 on their account. We eventually gave up, as no one from Stripe answered with other than pre-written answers. I even tried pinging them on IRC, but they couldn't help with these matters. They had no disputes, and Stripe provided no reason for the cancellation.

kitbrennan 11y ago

As mentioned by many others - there are a number of details missing here that are extremely relevant. What are you selling? Where? To whom? If you had hundreds of charges in your first month, did you migrate over from another payment supplier or are they brand new customers? If you migrated, how did you migrate? I used to work on fraud operations at a payment processor and there was always more to the story. There were four categories that account's broadly fell into: * The quiet fraudster. These would either have a scam business model with real victims attempting to pay, or would not have a business and were using stolen payment details to pay themselves. The quiet fraudster would not argue when you closed their account - they would just sign up again and try a different approach to get round your system. * The loud fraudster (the vast majority of fraudsters). These come in all shapes and sizes. They were often the most obvious frauds (100 payments from the same IP at our max payment amount, within 10 minutes of each other). Unfortunately they sometimes came in the form of someone deluded - for example the man that sold 'magic beans' that cured AIDS. These are the loud fraudsters because they will either shout down the phone at your support team (shouting never helps when calling support - by the way), or try and drum up negative PR to create pressure. * The accidental fraudster. These people have good intentions, but are none-the-less breaking the rules. For example, migrating all of your customers over to a new payment supplier by filling out a new payment form on their behalf (note - I worked for a payment processor that was not based on cards - this method may be allowed for CC though I doubt it). The accidental fraudster might also have fraudulent customers paying them yet be a legit business - for example online sellers of jewellery will have a lot of people pay with stolen details hoping that the business will ship the goods before the payment is flagged. Sometimes you can work with the business to fix the issue, many times you have to let them go (remember, they will have all the signs of an obvious fraudster - so you have to be sure that their story is true). * The innocent. As you can imagine, sometimes there are people that have all the signs of a fraudster yet are perfectly legitimate. There can be many reasons for this. === Without a lot more information, I cannot begin to speculate what category the author falls into - hopefully one of the latter two. That said, as much as I love what Stripe in general, it is completely unacceptable for them not to have an escalated support/appeals process for fraud complaints. If they have made a mistake (which happens even with the best fraud systems), then they could be destroying a business that might have customers/employees/suppliers that are also relying on them to receive their payments on time.

bargl 11y ago

Can we please all take a look at disapointeddev's account and use just a little bit of salt here? Just one grain maybe? His account was obviously activated for the purpose of submitting this post and he has provided NO follow up comments at this time. His post has been up for an hour. I'm not saying anything about the validity of his claim, but we obviously need more information. Please check back and wait for him to respond to the many great questions already on here.

disappointeddev 11y ago
As I said, I will be writing a more lengthy blog post about this. The only reason I posted this on HN is because I want Stripe to give me attention and solve the problem. I love Stripe's API which is why I want them to solve the issue. Also, I made a new account for my privacy.
- bargl 11y ago
  Thanks for replying. I'd like it if you could link to the blog after you've finished writing it, but if you don't want to for privacy purposes I get that. I just see people running off in a million directions in the comments on HN and it's nice to wait and let things play out a little before we jump on any bandwagons, this is an event that requires a follow up to be a complete story. So please also follow up with your experience with Stripe after coming to this forum (through link to your blog or in the comments or an edit). I'm sure we'd all like to get the complete story.
  - sdalfakj 11y ago
    > let things play out a little Dude will be losing money while you get your popcorn ;)

gdulli 11y ago

Every time I see a post like this it makes me wonder if other businesses have unfairly gotten a bad reputation because of anecdotes reported by anonymous customers whose version of the story is subjective, biased, possibly exaggerated, etc. When a company is huge, even one out of 100,000 transactions going badly adds up to a lot of anecdotes.

yc1010 11y ago
In case of PayPal the bad reputation is deserved In case of Stripe i sent last week a question in reply to an email from them from last year, there is no ticketing system it seems I got replies from 2 different people today after a week (not the same person one who originally was friendly and talked to me and might not be working there). Both answers were somewhat positive but a bit contradictory. I do not believe that Stripe are fundamentally "evil" like PayPal, well not yet anyways we will see how turns out with more growth and more staff who might not care about customers.

AC__ 11y ago

All of these payments services are going to die within 5 years anyway. Before people get all pissy and down vote this assertion let me you remind you that a massive(and growing) portion of the world has become completely disillusioned with the global fiat currency system(or perhaps just enlightened as to how it works?), regardless, its days are numbered. I am not however entirely convinced that cryptocurrencies, namely bitcoin, aren't in fact a creation of global financiers anticipating rejection of the fiat currency model, but fuck it we'll see.

Aloha 11y ago
This holds about as much water as a colander. Show me a survey show this supposed massive disillusionment with fiat currency.
- AC__ 11y ago
  Umm what about entire countries...Iceland...Greece.
  - thoughtpolice 11y ago
    You didn't answer his question as to where this 'clear mass disillusionment' is. Where is the actual proof fiat is on the way out?
  - task_queue 11y ago
    How are you twisting debt crises into a pitch for Bitcoin, the most centralized, 100% traceable and accountable crypto-currency on the net?
  - Aloha 11y ago
    In both Iceland and Greece you saw a massive loss of trust with the existing government (both since replaced democratically)- that has nothing to do with peoples faith in their currency, as you've not seen a real call in either place to go back to a specie backed currency. In Greece there have been calls to go back to the Drachma - but this doesn't mean a lack of faith in fiat currency, the greeks seem to more want out of the EU currency union then anything else.

Osiris 11y ago

I use the MinFraud service from MaxMind to try to avoid unauthorized transactions. Using Braintree, I first do an Authorization, if that goes through, I send details to MinFraud. If that passes a threshold, then I submit the payment for settlement. If not, I void the transaction. This process has helped to avoid all kinds of scammers using my website to try to validate stolen credit card details.

jonathancordeau 11y ago
Maybe you should build it. YC RFS Maybe? https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/ https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/
walterbell 11y ago
How much does this cost?
egillie 11y ago
How did you like it? Have you looked at Sift Science, by any chance?

amelius 11y ago

Why isn't there a standard way of filing complaints against a company and/or discussing them online? It would be so helpful if a consumer could just go to www.company.com, and click on a "discuss website" or "complain" button in the browser.

pc 11y ago

Stripe CEO here. I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm taking a look at what happened here. OP (disappointeddev), if you could drop me an email, that'd be great: patrick@stripe.com.

disappointeddev 11y ago
Sent!
- s_dev 11y ago
  We expect follow up posts if everything gets sorted - even if it embarrasses you or Stripe a little bit.
  - s_dev 11y ago
    Disappointed Dev Update after 24 Hours: "After speaking with Stripe I have decided to end our dealings. Unfortunately the issue could not be resolved. We are looking at alternate providers."
jeffmould 11y ago
This response alone is why I will always recommend Stripe. The support may need support of its own, but knowing that you can get management's attention fairly easily says a lot of great things about the company and the people working there in my book.
- GuiA 11y ago
  Yeah, except not every Stripe customer knows that the real place to get support is (apparently) Hacker News, rather than Stripe support. The fact that the official channels are non responsive but a post on HN gets an immediate response could be construed as a red flag: the company cares more about avoiding bad PR than about having good customer service.
  - pc 11y ago

gukov 11y ago

Good to know, but is there anyone that's better right now?

christop 11y ago

Reminds me of this tangentially-related comment from jwz a few days ago: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2015/06/internet-commerce-how-does-it-fucking-work/#comment-162859 http://www.jwz.org/blog/2015/06/internet-commerce-how-does-i...

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

joshdance 11y ago

TLDR - One devs account was shut down. He wants support and is getting it in the comments.

jdc0589 11y ago

Full disclosure, we are still in the implementation stage with Stripe, nothing in production yet, but customer service has been excellent so far. Sure, it's non-traditional, and I think they need a better user facing ticket system especially for important things that need tracking + accountability. Every time I have had a question about functionality, needed someone to take a look at test cases in my account, etc.., someone from Stripe has ALWAYS been available in IRC and quick to respond. That said, if they really are canceling accounts on short notice, that's pretty shitty. No reasonable sized application can realistically swap to a completely new payment provider in a week. There should be a bare minimum of a month or two of notice if your account is getting terminated.

holdenc 11y ago

It's worth noting: if you do 100K+ monthly via PayPal, you get a VIP support team for all business issues, and a Christmas card with their faces printed on the front. No kidding.

pestaa 11y ago
That's actually a surprisingly nice gesture. I have a feeling that PayPal may be able to rebuild the trust it lost in hacker minds.
hamburglar 11y ago
It's actually quite a bit lower than 100K. My company does about $20K/mo with PayPal and we have an assigned account rep who we contact directly for support. I don't think they've ever sent us a Christmas card, though. Maybe that's the difference between $20K and $100K. :)

anotherangrydev 11y ago

Just my 2¢. I create custom web commerce solutions for a few small/medium businesses in Mexico. Ever since Stripe launched a few years ago I wanted to try them out but, as expected, they were not available yet here. Still, I subscribed to their 'mailing list' in order to be notified whenever they would launch. Last year, I've heard that they were about to do it and eventually announced the market as 'Beta', whatever that means. Again, I subscribed to their list, this time, in order to be 'invited for their private beta'. I'm pretty sure I was at the top of their list, because back then not many people knew about stripe and further, less people from Mexico were interested with them; tbh, nowadays Stripe is something that you don't hear in the field in Mexico, at all. To this day I haven't heard from them, and for what I see Stripe here in Mexico operates more like some kind of secret society than a real business. My point is, I'm not doing business with them, and the reason is that it is clear that they're not here to offer a payment solution for developers in general, they are just here to hang out and provide the payment backbone for a few of their friends, and that's it. Even if I'm later deemed 'worthy of their attention', I won't integrate their payments platform with any kind of serious project that I would develop, and the reason is that they will always look at me as 'just another guy' and whenever I come up with some real problem that would need their attention they would just check out their A-list, realize that my name is not there and pretty much let me fuck up; just like it's doing it with many of the other guys that are posting here. For the moment I'll stick with PayU which I think is, by the way, a much better payment platform than Stripe if you take out all the 'pay with a single JSON Curl' fanfare. TL;DR: Ignoring your actual clients is the worst PR ever.

DINKDINK 11y ago

>So how could it be true that the payments are unauthorised? It could be no fault of your own but maybe your customers are using stolen credit cards.

beat 11y ago

Fraud is an incredibly difficult problem for payment processors, for both technical and business reasons. It's well worth studying if you're into this sort of thing. Fraud is a sensitivity/specificity problem. For sensitivity, Stripe wants to detect as many actual fraud cases as possible, because undetected fraud is expensive. For specificity, they want as few false positives as possible, because false positives mean angry customers who feel mistreated. Generally, there's a sensitivity/specificity tradeoff, and priorities need to be set (which is worse - letting criminals get away, or frustrating honest customers?). But at such a scale, and with so many creative minds working on new mechanisms for fraud, it's impossible to achieve perfect numbers on either side.

natemc 11y ago

Stripe is a Ycombinator company. I got downvoted when I told the CEO of Stripe my troubles with Stripe, he said to email but then never responded creating the public perception that they care, when they don't. You will just find downvoting brigades of people on HN when it comes to any YC backed company. Which is probably why this will be my last post on HN. You can't get anything truthful on here if YC has backed them.

vonklaus 11y ago
> Which is probably why this will be my last post on HN It is pretty great that the CEO comes on HN and handles support. That is a skip-level meeting. Usually support requests are handled at the bottom of the heirarchy pyramid, not the top. Yes people openly support and defend YC companies, this community is only possible because of YC, and is comprised of many employees, founders and peers of these companies. If you don't like being disagreed with though, you can pick up your ball and go home. I suspect that you will get a lot more value from this community than the one time you couldn't get a CEO to directly address your problems.
- velik_m 11y ago
  CEO is not handling support, he's handling PR

edem 11y ago

I will not use Stripe's services while I see these support issues cropping up.

djmollusk 11y ago

I've had no problems getting responses back from Stripe. Glad to see the CEO responded. Please please please don't become PayPal!

ygmelnikova 11y ago

A couple of days ago, Stripe gave one of our clients 14 days to 'switch their website over to a new provider' accusing them of selling 'pseudo-pharmaceuticals' when I know for a fact they do no such thing. It seems to be 'shoot first, and don't bother asking any questions'. Thing is, as a developer I spent a year trying to convince them to switch from their current payment gateway to Stripe. This particular client has been in business for a long time, and does $300K+ per month in sales. They have over 25,000 satisfied customers and zero BBB or other complaints. Needless to say, Stripe has given our company a black eye.

deleted 11y ago

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spdustin 11y ago

Wouldn't it help in a lot of cases to have an automatic escalation system in place, via SLA rules or other triggers, to raise up the visibility of messages from people whose accounts are being shut down? Have it post to IRC, Slack, PagerDuty, etc. when an email comes in from a customer flagged as "account closing by administrative action" or whatever?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

gravanom 11y ago

Huh, and here I am just finalizing my application for Stripe's "user ops" support crew.

pbreit 11y ago
Congrats, it's a great company.

disappointeddev 11y ago

Update: After speaking with Stripe I have decided to end our dealings. Unfortunately the issue could not be resolved. We are looking at alternate providers.

bornabox 11y ago
Could you explain with some details? I'd be quite interested in understanding what happened, and I imagine others would too.
dear 11y ago
Elaborate please?
jordanthoms 11y ago
When you are vague and refuse to elaborate, it can only lead us to think that your business isn't as squeaky clean as you make out.
- developer1 11y ago
  I believe you meant to say "it proves your business isn't as squeaky clean as you make out". With a response like that, clearly their business was operating in some kind of grey area. It's unfortunate that when this happens, the company (ex: Stripe) can't come back and disclose specific details about the scumbag making a stink on HackerNews over something that the company was perfectly in the right to shut down. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses want to accept credit cards online with little to no effort in managing the risk. 1-2% doesn't sound like enough wiggle room, but if a company isn't using misleading marketing, is not defrauding users, has a product actually worth what they are charging, and offers instant support for refunds - then staying under 2% is not difficult. Too many businesses want the risk to be handled by external forces. If you want to accept money online, make sure your business is prepared to manage the risks. You can't just drop in the payment processing and wait for the money to roll in.

GBond 11y ago

Is it me of posting/commenting on HN has become the default method of resolving a Stripe issue when all normal channels fail?

fndrplayer13 11y ago

What was the end result of your discussion with the CEO? Was everything resolved?