I wish something like Stripe existed in 2004. If it had, we wouldn't have had to start the company...
I've had to ask them to call up their bank/card provider and request for the restriction to be removed.
Is Stripe's ease of onboarding/getting started causing such a high rate of flagged transactions? What's going on behind the scenes between banks and payment services providers and is this something that could be improved in the future?
I did contact Stripe support a while ago to ask about this, but they didn’t seem to know any more than we did and weren’t able to do anything to improve the situation. The best theory we have so far is that given how many of the transactions fail in the second month of a subscription and the greater proportion of international failures compared to domestic, we’re coming in borderline on a lot of US banks’ fraud checks, perhaps because we’re abroad and charging in a different currency. Then when we don’t have the card security code after the first payment, maybe that pushes us over the line. We’re hardly a high risk business generally, though, so it would be interesting to know whether this problem is inherent to accepting international card payments or something more specific to Stripe.
Naturally we’re investigating whether general improvements we could make, such as charging in local currencies or better Dunning management, would improve the success rate. However, it’s hard to make sensible decisions with so little useful data about the cause of the problem, particularly for a business with limited development resources available that we’d rather spend on developing the service itself. In the meantime, I read these anecdotes on HN about businesses aiming for at least 95 or 98 percent retention month-to-month and dream...
So it's cool you're translating stuff, but none of it matters if customers can't pay. It's 2015, you need PayPal level of compatibility.