Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshmn | Hacker News Reader

Just an incredibly kind PSA to everyone while we're on the subject of processing payments: Plaid's account verification does not in any significant or meaningful way prevent fraudulent transactions. Neither does Stripe.

In fact, Stripe loves the chargeback fees, and there's a whole lot of "stuff" that's waiting to be released (and I don't mean as a feature) that will kindly support this.

"Hi joshmn I'd love to hear how we can improve [but we will actually take what you say with a grain of salt because you're not in our club.]"

I might sound bitter, but I'm not; I'm simply appalled. Not because I was burned by Stripe personally. Instead, my clients have, and you probably know someone that has too.

Please for the love of your company/business/project, review transactions carefully. For most things that are just getting started, all it takes is one transaction to really screw things up. For businesses, you have ~3 lives.

Your now-friendly, former-fraudster

View on HN

My first job out of University was working for a credit card processor and debt collection centre. It was just after Check-21 passed. I learned a lot about ACH, IRDs and credit card ISOs.

After leaving the US, I realized how terribly behind our banking system is compared to every other country in the world. Most of the EU, Australia, NZ all have direct person-to-person transfer via account number. Any bank to any bank, via web or phone app. Germany and other EU nations go further and offer TAN numbers (1-time use numbers, sorta-2-factor, but not really).

The US ACH system is absolutely terrible. The Federal Reserve need a supplemental system with 1-directional person-to-person transfer numbers. Our tax numbers also need to stop being used as a secret. No other country does that.

>direct person-to-person transfer via account number. Any bank to any bank,

The US doesn't have that? I can't transfer money to you, even if I have your bank account number? How are people expected to transfer money to each other then?

Cheques! Or Paypal kind of stuff

Yes, it's ridiculous

I don't understand this. You can't transfer money to another person from your bank account?

In India we have IMPS (sort of an instant transfer) which takes less than a second and costs Rs. 5 at a private bank (free at a public sector one).

I've been to Australia and transferring money to another account with the same bank requires just a mobile number.

Well, at least if there's a problem, you can always pick up the phone and give Stripe a cal–OH WAIT YOU CAN'T.

I'm sorry–I love Stripe as a product–but it blows my mind that a company with a $5B+ valuation that touches your business' money only has email support. Not even fast email support (in my experience, 12h+ response time is normal). Not even a ticket number.

That's why you go with Braintree.

  They offer $50k in processing fee-free, which saves you ~ $1500 immediately.

  Their fee for currency conversion is 1%, while Stripe's is 2%.

  They reply much faster to email inquires and you can call them.

  They support more countries than Stripe.

For those reasons I wanted to go with Brain Tree, but they don't support ACH.

Then use Braintree for cards and Stripe for ACH.

ACH is cheaper than cards, but it's also slower and has a limit of $10,000 per transaction [1]. Cards have a limit of $1 million per transaction [2], which is 100x bigger than ACH. Also, people are used to paying with cards.

  [1] https://support.stripe.com/questions/accepting-ach-payments-with-stripe
  [2] https://support.stripe.com/questions/what-is-the-maximum-amount-i-can-charge-with-stripe

Wait, what? 1 million? I thought Visa had a hard limit of $2k USD per day.

And $10k limit for ACH? You can transfer more money than that via SWIFT.

Limits vary based on your bank, card type (debit vs credit), account type (personal vs. business) and what you're doing with the money (withdrawing cash vs. spending online). You can also ask to increase the limit. People can also get multiple cards and use them for online payments.

  ... limit of $2k USD per day.

AWS and AdWords both accept cards and people spend a lot of money there. Online accommodation booking can cost more than $2k and people have no problems doing it.

If you have items with high prices, just send users a quick notification to check whether their cards have a limit and to ask their bank to lift it.

> And $10k limit for ACH? You can transfer more money than that via SWIFT.

Not surprising. It seems ACH is still run with punch card technology

> I thought Visa had a hard limit of $2k USD per day.

Of course not. Maybe your bank has such a limit on your card, but there's definitely no hard limit that low imposed by any of the Visa/Mastercard/Amex. How else would you buy things over $2k?

Except Braintree are owned by PayPal and, just like PP, they love to just randomly kill your merchant account. I know plenty of people this has happened to for no good reason other than 'sorry you no longer fit our risk profile'.

I love Stripe for its of ease use, clean UI, etc., but yes their fraud/chargeback handling sucks.

My wife's box club business gets dinged all the time by fraudulent transactions. She uses CrateJoy, and they tell us it's our and Stripe's job to filter fraud. Well, I don't have a 24/7 SOC dedicated to filtering out fraud, so I have to rely on Stripe. Stripe, even with all the verification features enabled, still does very little to prevent fraudulent charges. My wife loses a not insignificant portion of her money on heavy renewal months (like 3 months after Christmas and most recently 6 months after Christmas) with people charging back for fraud or just because they want a refund. And of course Stripe is happy to slurp up the insane fees for it.

We'd move, but CrateJoy makes things really, really, really easy for her in terms of managing members and shipping. It's just a bummer to deal with this all the time.

What type of box business? Just ever curious about businesses people operate. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com