How Braintree destroyed a successful taxi startup from Serbia
facebook.com
facebook.com
Their integration with Magento sucks too...Set up all of the anti-fraud tools and you will barely get a payment to go through...
What does Braintree's SLA look like? Are these service levels something a UK customer ought to expect having enrolled for an account with Braintree?
No doubt this would be a questionable business practice on Braintree's part if true, but clarity around expectations from each party is pretty fundamental to the question at hand.
If the SLA says they're available from M-F 9am-5pm NYC time then you're SOL if you're expecting them to be around on Saturday morning.
EDIT: For the non-native speakers, SOL = Shit Outta Luck
" What are your support hours? For European merchants our email and phone support is available from 11am to 11pm GMT, Monday through Friday.
Of course, we offer emergency support via email 24x7x365, and have support reps and engineers on-call at all times."
I had to get my Paypal rep to get some people high up at Paypal Europe to contact Braintree to get my emergency service.
It's not my intent to apologize for Braintree, about whom I know virtually nothing.
I had a company and a bnak account registered in UK, and PayPal didn't want to do business with me, because I lived in Poland. I couldnt register for Polish paypal either, because the company was in UK.
E.g. when I opened my first US bank account the bank required me to get a copy my ID documents notarised, and wouldn't accept just any notary public, it had to be notarised by the US consulate.
I know of only two that'll even entertain this: TD Bank and Silicon Valley Bank.
The key thing is that a lot of their front line staff may either not know or don't want to deal with the hassle of this for a "normal" account holder.
Best bet is generally to get through to whatever department handles high net worth individuals or corporate accounts. Some banks also have special departments handling expats that are used to dealing with the hassle of people who are not present. And even if you're a foreign national, those departments may be able/willing to help.
Even if they're not the right ones to handle the account opening (I certainly was not a high net worth client when I opened my first ones) these are the teams most likely to know if their bank allows for it and who to talk to.
If you have a lawyer or accountant, my impression is that your odds go up just by channeling your request through them. Presumably it makes them think you're more likely to be a potential high value client. In general this sidesteps a lot of complications with banks.
An approach some may allow if they do need you to come in is for you to come in to non-branch offices. E.g. a large bank with a private wealth management or investment banking office in your country may be willing to let you pop in (by appointment) to show your ID there if you find the right person and ask nicely.
I get the impression that with a lot of banks just demonstrating that you know about premier/high net worth departments or think to go to a corporate / investment department creates the implication in their mind that you're not a regular customer and should be treated with some extra care just in case you turn out to be important.
You can be Canadian and have a bank account in US dollars. But the way to transfer money would be the Canadian system.
Different countries require different paperwork from money transmitters, and you have tomcomplain with it. If you could just follow your country's red tape, all the money transmitters would just operate from an unregulated tax heaven...
https://developers.braintreepayments.com/reference/general/c...
And for that reason, I direct my clients to go elsewhere.
But then, we're not really representative of the rest of Europe I guess. Even less so nowadays :(
Really! If it is a subsidiary of PayPal - That itself is an evidence that stuff doesn't always work and destined for poor customer service. When stuff works with PayPal, it normally works. But when it doesn't work - it's almost impossible to get their Support to acknowledge the problem. I've been following up on two problems - first one is 10 months old related to reducing merchant fees (as they advertise), the second one is 6 months old related to incorrectly deducted chargeback fee (when there was really no chargeback). Every time they have a call with me, the support person doesn't know the history of the case. I've given up on those cases because its not a huge amount to crib on. For now, being outside the US, PayPal holds a strong monopoly. But Really - if its from PayPal, its destined to be poor customer service with some horror stories.
CarGo's experience is a great example. For an app that lives and dies on efficient payment processing, they would have had been wise to have two payment processors coded up and ready to go. They should have been completely honest with their payment processors, built up a relationship, and sought assurances that their operation was acceptable.
The payment processor's biggest problem by far is fraud. That is why they have to charge significant margins, and why you have to send all your great-grandparent's birth certificates to them, and why they will suspend your account if there is the faintest whiff of suspicion. That's what makes the decrement-increment hard - really hard.
Treat the payments problem with the respect it deserves - as CarGo has found out, it can kill your business dead overnight.
The first few weeks of operation the "backup" gateway would suspend your account for not providing the necessary volume of sales.
I'd need to do more research to find the best solution but it looks like payment processor risk is definitely something that can be mitigated.
I can't explain our difference experiences - maybe it's down to providers. We've been through five, and are currently very happy with Stripe.
Then eventually you can make a decision which works best. The new provider (the backup) or the old provider. Then turn the volume to the best one.
Though I would never go 100% on any of them. Maybe keep some geoip through the backup. E.g. South America with one provider. France with another. Or a 5% load balanced volume.
It is good to keep them all up to date and active, as from experience they all frequently f-up and you have to feature toggle a provider off for a day or week now and then, or at least throttle them down.
From my experience you end up being tied pretty hard to pretty one provider and as long as you make fraud prevention yourself you can stay in business. Problem is that if you do all the fraud prevention stuff yourself then why do you need braintree for? To just invoke a .charge(100, "EUR")??
The rate difference would be an investment in redundancy. If Provider A goes down, I would guess you'll be grateful to have Provider B taking the failover traffic, even if costs you an extra 2.9% in transaction costs. You'd keep feeding Provider B the minimally-acceptable amount of traffic at the higher price point to keep that redundancy alive.
Without more exact details it is hard to cast an objective judgment, for me at least. Though the dude seems pretty pissed.
Six months into our "cooperation" they sent an email breaking the contract with us(e-commerce retailer) because their "bank" was protesting too many of our sales..
The truth of the matter is that Braintree was literally accepting all credit card transactions and had almost 0 fraud protection(for example we had orders being shipped to a Greek city, ordered by Iraqi-named citizens using US based credit cards..they all went through fine).
So they just breached the cooperation and they kept a large chunk of the owed money for like 4 months until their "bank" verified some thing or the other.
In my personal experience you cannot rely on Braintree to block fraudulent transactions for you - you have to do it yourself and pray that still you don't miss on too many frauds passing through to Braintree. Makes you wonder what use all these "credit card gateways" have if you still have to bear all the cost of doing the fraud-prevention yourself..
Or you can whine about it on Facebook and a few weeks from now you'll be forgotten.
Get a local loan,
We need a loan of X to keep us operating for the next few months. what kind of terms can you give us?"
Serbia might not be the kind of place where this is possible, but I could go to my local credit union in Ann Arbor and probably pull this off in less than an hour. Head home, get operations back up same-day, and proceed to bust ass on implementing a new provider on the backend.
* Getting a loan isn't easy. * Getting a credit card isn't easy. * Getting an overdraft facility isn't easy.
They are fantastic to work with, and its super easy to get setup with them. Hats off!
A payments processor (old school or digital) is constantly taking on some certain amount of risk of fraud, from both the credit card user and the merchant itself. I could set up a store that appears to be real and just move my money out of my bank account and run. I could also go to a carding site, use real credit cards on my own fake store, wait for my transfers to process, cash out of my store and run. I could 'just' use it as a small operation to check whether my stolen credit cards are really working, and then make big purchases later... and that's just the very basics in merchant fraud.
Between this fraud, and risks from otherwise honest parties (what do you think happens when people preorder something, the company goes under, and the consumer tells the CC company that they want their money back? Someone ends up holding the bag), it'd be pretty much impossible to run a payment processor as a non profit center without a lot of work. Add to that that merchants want more complex features, like subscriptions, the effort to maintain PCI compliance, and that adding support for each new payment type and country is a pain in the behind for everyone, even for companies that do their very best to cut out every middleman.
So as long as you are interacting with banks and the risk of fraud is not carried 100% by the consumer, bitcoin style, you'll have a lot more innovation than you think, most of it dedicated to making life harder for fraudsters, and you'll find that this is something that you have to do for-profit. I'd not even consider doing it without venture capital, because you need a bankroll to handle the fraud losses which will definitely happen.
If you want proof of the innovation going on, just ask any fraud forum out there: There were plenty of people with nice and easy ways to defraud online processors, but nowadays, for all but the best fraudsters, it's a whole lot of effort for very little compensation.
And still, I'd not be caught dead carrying the amount of risk that someone like Braintree or Stripe is carrying on a regular basis without a profit motive.
Fraud can be solved by making each irreversible txn ratable. Each seller can choose to make sum of all ratings and txn over some period public to appear more trustworthy. The algo can be more tweaked but txn rating is the gist.
https://i.imgur.com/A8T3aso.jpg
They both have the name of the app in the top center, in a thin stylized font, with lots of spacing between the letters. Immediately under is the words "Pickup location" in light text on a white background then under that the address where you are being picked up. There's a blue circle to represent your location.
There's the map with pastel colors, and a popup with round corners saying "Set Pickup Location" then on the right side of that is a circle with a right 90 degree angle arrow inside with rounded corner and ends. Under that is a pushpin with a sphere with a specular highlight. In one corner of the screen is a man's silhouette inside a circle.
Now if he said something like "eating a lassanga soupy mixture that you call pizza" I would have been clapping.
We need to have multiple options for vital services like payment.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1650565665218718/
I know this is awful, but the general reputation/expectation is that a foreign company can't handle payments infrastructure in Serbia, I never thought it would be the backwards version of this.
Here is a great piece by Danny Shader, CEO of PayNearMe. They are one of the most successful payments startups in recent history. You should give it a read: http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/17/so-you-want-to-start-a-pay...
But not one I would recommend. As you would spend too much of your time on your payment solution than your business. Continually trying to detect fraud, recovering from devastating fraud that has already happened, dealing with volumes of chargebacks, hiring a lot of customer service people, wasting time on edge cases, accepting customers from different countries, dealign with legal from different countries etc.
If only a niche business for local customers, with low volume, then fine. Not for nationwide, definitely not for international, and not for big volumes.
Lots there and to be fair there a lot of other providers not even listed on that wikipedia page. Actually a few big ones that I have worked are not on there: Vindicia, PayEx, Paymill, etc
- Let the drivers accept cash in the meantime?
- Move to another payment processor? (e.g. Stripe?)
- Accept bitcoin?
- Use some direct payment between passengers and drivers? (e.g. Venmo, bitcoin, etc.)
(I messaged him that)
Calling them assholes raises my eyebrow. It seems like the kind of place that would show a rude CS agent the door zero strikes you're out.
"It sure is a weekend. It is probably nice and cozy for most of you over there in Chicago, enjoying a ball game, visiting friends and family, grilling that steak, feeling good about yourself."
It is funny how people like this want to blame and paint American corporations as evil, yet they build their business on startups and companies that could have only been founded and successful here in the US. They hope and dream of making it to Silicon Valley, raising money from US investors. It is total hypocrisy. Don't like it, why don't you use only Serbian companies, banks, and investors to power your startup? Oh that's right...
You must also have a bank account with a US, European, Australian, Canadian, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysian, or New Zealand-chartered bank.