Tell HN: Stripe brought my business to a dead stop

My dad had a similar experience with his non-technical business. Basically there was a lien on his account, he cleared it up with the other party, but Stripe continued to hold his balance hostage. Customer support forms and process led to more black holes or repetitive automated responses. He didn't have access to his funds for several weeks. I was able to get him a direct contact at Stripe thru my network.

Horrible experience. I'll still use Stripe for the convenience and hoping that they improve the situation with these kinds of potentially life shattering account locks and provide more humane customer service

If you have a direct contact at Stripe, suddenly you can do things, and things become possible.

Wow - I didn't expect this many responses - seems like I'm not the only one who's experienced the same issue. Quick answer to some of the comments here:

- We DO NOT have ridiculous membership commitments w/ auto-renew. Our membership is month to month (unless you've prepaid for 6 or 12 mos). - It's been approx a week since I received the email suspending my account. At first, I tried to contact support by chat or phone, but it seems that when they suspend an acct, they block your ability to contact support by any method except by email...of which I sent approximately 8 with no response. I realize it hasn't been that long, but we're a small operation - I can't afford (literally...cannot financially afford it) to let this drag on for weeks or months w/o a resolution of some sort.

Quick update - After sending an email to Edwin@stripe, I got a response within the hour. Thank You Edwin. This was the reply:

"Unfortunately, we will only be able to accept payments for xx for a bit longer. Stripe can only support users with a low risk of customer disputes. After reviewing your business and account information, we've found that your business presents a higher level of risk than we're able to work with.

As noted above, your service will not end immediately—we understand that moving away from Stripe can take time. To help with the transition, we are able to provide you five additional days (beginning today) to switch to a new provider. Because of the elevated dispute risk here, your account balance will be placed on reserve for the next 90 days, the industry-standard period during which most payments are disputed. During this time, the reserved funds will help cover any disputes or refunds on your account. The remaining balance will transfer to your bank account at the end of this period[1]."

Not really telling me anything new - we're not a "high-risk" industry (according to Stripe's list) and have not had any disputes or chargebacks AT ALL. Be that as it may... But I still CAN'T REFUND PAYMENTS TO CUSTOMERS! <sigh>

Stripe really sucks for this and it's discouraged me from using them in the future. That said, small gyms are likely a high risk business for charge backs because despite how well you run yours, many of them are predatory or scammy or generally just awful.

@southbaybox, I've seen a similar issue a few months back: . https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19126301 (2019-02-08, crypto-currencies)

For a few years I worked on a startup that aimed to address fraud management in e-commerce from a quantitative risk modelling perspective. And when Stripe released radar 2.0, I went through their docs. I was impressed by Stripe's marketing (docs) and UI—they're knowingly good for that, but I was much less impressed by radar 2.0's feature-set and product. The biggest issue for me was their "one-size-fit-all" approach, because that just does NOT work in what I've seen, i.e., both billion- and million-euro businesses.

From a risk management perspective, a 2-7% gross margin e-commerce manages risk totally differently than a 50%+ gross margin e-commerce. For one, the false negative (i.e., a fraud gets through) is super-expensive. For the other, a false positive (i.e., a real client is stopped) is super expensive. And I did not see anywhere in their docs how they integrated the cost-imbalance of the risk for each of their client (you), and event less for each of their client's clients! It's possible to do, but it's hard.

Of course, like any fraud prevention system, radar 2.0 allows clients to add rules and lists to customise their logic, but these mechanisms are difficult to setup when you start processing payments, because you don't have yet any payment history, as well as when your e-commerce gains in velocity and complexity, because you don't necessarily have the in-house resources or skills to keep your rules and lists up to date and well maintained.

And in the lucky case that one just feels happy with Stripe's radar 2.0 system, then how do you know that you're not loosing customers? Having no risk of chargeback is very easy, just don't accept any payment and you've a risk-free e-commerce! In my experience, we increased sales by 7% (a few tenths of millions of euros) by just re-parameterising how fraud was managed. I don't see anywhere anywhere in the docs why and how I should trust radar 2.0 for the specifics of e-commerce A, B, and C. One-size-fit all just doesn't work.

As a former startup founder in that area, I still see we're a long way towards personalised risk management in e-commerce services, that would help owners throughout the different stages of their e-commerce, i.e., idea, proof of concept, scaling, growth... sounds similar?

Best of luck :-)

Fitness centers, weight loss centers, supplement and vitamin shops and telemarketing of these items are on most high risk lists. Interesting that they are not on stripe's, I didn't know that.

Is your credit good? That's sometimes another flag that can come up.

I work at Stripe. Could you forward that email to me at edwin@stripe.com and I can investigate what happened? I'm really sorry for the trouble.

y'all are on the customer service! Out of curiosity... is this automated or were you just kicking around on HN?

>> y'all are on the customer service!

This is not customer service.

This is the unfortunate trend in the industry where the only way to get issues resolved is to take to social media and shame the company such that some powerful insider at the company (who happens to hang out on HN) takes action to sidestep the failed customer support processes and get the issue resolved.

I assume they monitor it, I got personally emailed to my profile email, as well as replied to, after making a post on HN about stripe.

Worked out well, happy with the support.

I hope you also read the original poster's follow-up message elsewhere in the comments. Apparently the amazing support they could offer was a five day migration period before they cut off all payment processing, and also keeping 100% of the money hostage for three months. And of course not answering the central question of just what were these unauthorized payments, if there are no chargebacks.

Do you still feel like commending them for amazing customer service?

This should not be the outcome.

It should not be necessary for someone to come to an online forum and complain to get the customer support issue resolved.

Stripe customer support organisation should actually resolve customer issues.

Tech companies go on and on and on and ON about "culture", but one thing I can tell you truly needs to be built into culture is customer support. For example, everyone knows Google's culture of customer support - it's "avoid all human contact, send all support queries to a machine".

I think tech companies are super bad at customer support because the founders have rarely worked front line in customer support so they don't know how to build an organisation around great customer support thus it is not part of the culture/company DNA.

Seriously, Hacker News should have a "tech support" link at the top where people can post tech support queries for companies who can't manage to respond to and keep their customers supported and happy.

The original post doesn't say that they even contacted customer service. We know that they got an email, poked around their dashboard, got some errors, and posted here. We do not know what else was done.

Your point may be valid, if customer service dropped the ball. But we don't know that just from the info posted here so far.

> & support doesn't respond to my numerous messages.

From the post: "[S]upport doesn't respond to my numerous messages". I would say that pretty clearly indicates that OP did in fact contact customer service at Stripe.

I've called Amazon around AWS issues and I have to disagree with you. They even seem to step outside of support boundaries when troubleshooting things (which they shouldn't do). I pay for the lowest level of service I think - $100/month. Light user.

We also only are getting one side of story.

Not to knock on a gym - but I'd be interested in the membership plan rules - some of fitness memberships should be flat out illegal - auto renewal for a year, can't cancel to early, but have to cancel before end of membership (short cancellation windows) and big rigmarole.

> I've called Amazon around AWS issues and I have to disagree with you

AWS support is stellar. We have workloads on the three major cloud providers, and AWS support is better by an order of magnitude. If anything, this has spoiled us. When things that take minutes to solve (or figure out) on AWS takes days on another cloud provider, no amount of technical wizardry can make up for it. They won't be dragging your feet just because you have a lower level plan, but if you want to call them to solve stuff right now on the phone or have them showing up at your company with specialists in tow, then you have to fork over the required amount. It's well spent, IMHO.

GCP support is a joke. I've spent over a week litigating the question of whether an obvious bug is a bug before.

AWS support is good, particularly if you get on the phone.

I had one guy work the better part of the day with several phone calls to get to the bottom of my non-critical issue.

Not all experiences have been excellent (I think they could head off half my tickets if their status page would just be accurate), but Amazon is far from the "do humans actually work there" category.

no, customer support is anathema towards the sort of insanely scaled platform monopolizing type of stuff that these firms chase.

you don't get to be the winner in a winner take all ecosystem being dragged down by individual requests. you do your best to reduce them to acceptable orders of magnitude, and those that do hit the mines get blown up.

that's the takeaways from all large scale/VC funded platforms. they just don't care, because it's not incentivized. when you have 1 million customers, 1000 casualties are a statistic. when you have 10, it's a different story.

Not true. It just depends on the ethos of the company. I wouldn’t call Amazon support “amazing” but it’s clear they have properly scaled their human staff to reasonably accommodate the number of customers they have.

Have you ever tried doing the same for a Google product? Guarantee their optimizing for operational efficiency and not customer happiness. At all.

which side of the company? i "dealt" with AWS "support" in the past, where they were super eager to send us a representative and sales deals at the beginning, then it was probably 2 orders of magnitude higher turn around interval when it came to technical issues.

to be fair i'm not sure what their retail help setup is.

we were a small fry spending wise so it's ok, but let's not kid ourselves, they aren't pro-customer after you're on the platform unless you're throwing around serious cash.

It shouldn't be, but effective customer service is extremely hard. Escalation to social media is a process we should all be grateful exists now. It didn't always.

This should not be the outcome.

Let's hope it gets the OPs problem resolved and Stripe uses this case as a learning experience so this doesn't happen again.

Bill Gates has said something like "Your most unhappy customers are your biggest learning opportunity."

> I think tech companies are bad at customer service because the founders have rarely worked front line

Customer service rep turned engineer here. I think this true, but I also think that so many founders just don’t care about customer service. Investors are far more interested in new customer acquisition than retention, so naturally more resources are going toward customer acquisition.

Customer service is an afterthought cost center that barely pays and experiences high churn in 90% of the companies I’ve worked for in my career.

Yeah, plus customer service is one of those highly manual and error-prone business processes that are nearly impossible to (properly) automate which are so annoying to Silicon Valley.

In my experience the Silicon Valley approach to it is to optimize your product for the 98% of customers who won't need anything more hands on from you, throw some automation (in the form of documentation, chat bots, and phone menus) at the remaining 2%, and don't worry too much about anyone who falls through the cracks past that.

Which can lead to a great experience most of the time unless you're one of those unlucky leftovers, in which case the ground falls out from beneath you into a labrynthine Kafkaesque hell proportional in brutality to the size of the company and the extent to which you depend on it.

I've consulted with a large customer service org at an oil delivery company-- the VP looked me dead in the eye and said "customer service is a free therapy service we provide to our customers when we as a company have decided it is unprofitable to service them in a timely and high quality manner"

I appreciated his honesty. It was a cost center designed to not achieve a favorable outcome for the customer.

> Investors are far more interested in new customer acquisition than retention

Good investors (I.e, the ones who make investments that turn out to be successful) care a lot about retention, as it’s the strongest indicator that the product/service being offered has enduring value/appeal.

Actually, posting here from a fresh account allows to reach a quite broad audience with over-generalized warnings for ALL small businesses to take care while dealing with Stripe. The story lacks details, names timing and etc., although most of the commenters immediately believe the OP and start blaming Stripe’s support line and support processes in IT industry in general (problems exist, sure). It may be rather considered as opportunity, that someone from Stripe offers help in such situation with description that looks like blaming and crying that Stripe is EEEVIL instead of searching for advice, how to solve the problem.

So, on one hand, everything you're writing is true. Posts like this, assuming they accurate reflect what's happened, mean that customer service has failed, and now the customer has to resort to ad hoc channels for addressing an issue. It's not a good look.

OTOH, every system has its limits and failures, and effective monitoring of communication outside official systems is one way that organizations can figure out what's not working about their system.

The real test is if they handle issues with one-off fixes and situation-specific exceptions, or if they figure out how their official channels failed and fix it.

Why do companies only read social media and not their E-mails? It seems often the only way to get things resolved is by going public. Otherwise you are shown the finger.

Stripe is vulnerable, because there are always scammers working every angle they can. But a legitimate Stripe customer is even more vulnerable, because Stripe has many customers, but each customer probably has one payment processor. Stripe can err on the side of caution and put a customer out of business with little risk to itself.

So, I'd like to see Stripe feel enough heat that they decide that any time they suspend service for a customer, that customer is (1) immediately entitled to talk to a live person at Stripe with the authority to undo the suspension (probably probationary and with limits while being appealed and investigated) and (2) guaranteed a quick resolution process that involves access to real people with authority.

If Stripe's policies are that going with them means living with a Sword of Damocles forever hanging over your head, that should be well-advertised whenever they are discussed.

Eh. What private company can't decide to cease doing business with you without recourse? People just seem weirdly blind to counterparty risk in financial services.

How does this happen? How is Stripe apparently on top of responding to HN posts, but not to actual support inquiries? Could this be by design?

Thank you! I just sent you an email a short while ago.

Edwin - I have emailed you twice and sent you a message on twitter but haven't heard back from you. Can you please response to my emails??

Folks have been complaining about Paypal in the same way. You buy yourself some safety as a company if you separate your payment gateway from your merchant accounts.

For instance, Authorize.net allows you to bolt on a merchant account, but retains the tokenization of the customers digits. So if one merchant account was restricted, a quick phone call to Authorize.net would allow you to switch over to another ready-to-use merchant account. And you could continue billing via existing subscriptions.

This is similar to the conversation about domain name hosting. Do you allow your name host to also be your web host? Or do you diversify to hedge against getting locked out?

Who do you recommend for payment gateway and for merchant accounts?

So before Stripe goes the way of Paypal, there seems to be something that can be done about this. I'm assuming Stripe has enough funds to hire for customer support, and given that businesses are Stripe's main customers, isn't there a thorough human review that happens before banning a business?

Plenty of customers sign agreements without understanding what charges they will incur, and gyms are notorious for this. But Stripe cannot simply shut down a business without hearing both sides of the story.

If there was a human review in this case, then no amount of HN publicity should revert the decision. If it does, that would expose the review process as being heavily flawed.

Do you mind to add a little more timing information? How many hours/days have passed since you got the email and since your first answer to stripe?

Agreed, this information is extremely relevant to anyone looking to use this story in a decision. I'd also point out that within minutes, a Stripe employee chimed in here with an offer to help.

I once spent 6 months in a hellish loop helping my disabled brother recover his Gmail account after "suspicious activity" (i.e. logging in after not using it for 6 months).

In desperation, I texted a friend who works in Google's marketing dept, and it was resolved in 30 minutes.

All companies, including those selling non-free services like Stripe, should sell expedited customer service (resolution guaranteed within X hours for $Y).

Talk this with a grain of salt: (not just for this case or company) Employees offering help after a case reached the first page of HN is worth nothing.

From what I can tell, it was the first response. Stripe employees also actively chime in on HN threads both positive and negative.

It doesn't matter if it was the first or last response. A person shouldn't have to post on HN to get proper support. Actually good support would have resulted in this post not needing to be made.

You're adding a lot of bias, unconscious or otherwise.

"have to" and "need" are strong words that I don't think you're in a position to use here.

Maybe didn't "have to" and they were just panicking. Maybe this post didn't "need" to be made.

I'm not in a position to use specific words to form my opinion? Did we get teleported to a dictatorship that I didn't know about? I can use whatever words I want to say what I want to say, and I know you're not in a position to stop me here.

Good customer service means that the issue is dealt within the standard support pipeline. That clearly failed, based on the wording of the post, especially mentioning that they received no response from support on the matter.

The fact that OP got support once they called Stripe out on social media, while great for OP, is not something to be admired because it means many people are also likely falling through the cracks and just giving up instead of reaching out on other channels.

But HN isn't (nor should it be) Stripe support. If support doesn't get answered via official channels and the user has to turn to arbitrary places to try to get the attention of someone at support, that's a serious minus, not a plus.

Hasn't a common criticism of Stripe always been lack of good customer support? IIRC there are dozens of threads similar to this one on here. This seems to be another example of that, not necessarily a new revelation.

This is how a lot of new companies can "disrupt". They don't do anything magical but save money on customer service, ignore rules or save employee benefits.

We’re using stripe and are overall happy. But their customer support is pretty bad. Lots of canned replies and ping-pong back and forth until you get someone to actually read your question.

It's always fine until you have an actual problem...

The issue with Stripe's ethos is that it wants to stay really lean, which usually means not scaling customer support. If the entire company is 2000, how many full time support staff do they have? How has the headcount grown with # merchants onboarded?

This isn't specific to Stripe, by the way. I think Google has the same culture around support. My Google Pay account has been in a permanently screwed up state for years and have never been able to reach someone to resolve it. They just care about operational efficiency above all else.

On the other hand, I actually think Square has a very mature and responsive support staff. I have gotten what would probably be considered low priority issues resolved in less than an hour through various channels.

I hope this gets addressed. It would really suck if Stripe becomes nothing more than Paypal with a better API.

and in the meantime Braintree (Paypal) will become better than Stripe with a good support.

That sucks. But how do we know that you aren't a fraudster? You haven't told us the name or URL of your business.

There's a lot of incentive for fraudsters to put pressure on payment processors with fake stories on social media. Their hope is that the processor re-enables their account so they can continue charging stolen credit card numbers.

As far as refunds go is there anything stopping you from giving out cash? Not to be snarky or anything but the lesson I've taken from these sort of posts is to always have multiple payment systems set up, like Wikileaks: https://shop.wikileaks.org/donate.

Stripe is really trendy but this site isn't so fond of them: https://www.cardpaymentoptions.com/credit-card-processors/st.... There are hundreds of other providers to choose from. I'm not sure I'd trust the site's recommendations directly, always do your own research too, but it's a useful starting point.

Perhaps one solution to this problem, which is popular in the UK, is set up child companies to do things like payment processing. If your provider blocks one company, you can simply set up with another subsidiary. Rinse and repeat.

It’s the same case as Google and AirBnB. It’s too expensive to have support at that scale so they skip it.

There is always a risk to go with a big player when you’re small. They don’t give a shit about you. You barely move the metric.

When you go with a small player, the risk is they may die.

Only a few companies have been able to do support at scale. Amazon comes to mind being last focused on customer. Microsoft may be second in hand holding their enterprise customers.

There are players between the small players and Stripe, which can get you decent support with a decent chance they will stay around.

I've extensively used both Merchant e-Solutions and Authorize.Net, both of which have been around a lot longer than Stripe, and not had trouble getting support from either. (Also, Authorize.Net is actually owned by Visa, which is certainly not small).

This is worrying. We are planning to move to stripe hence I have a few questions. Were you experiencing any other issues before they did these, for example, there is a high number of refunds, fees charged etc..? Typically you are allowed by law to dispute chargebacks.

I learned from previous experience, never have a single payment processor ever. The best rule of thumb pay the higher fee but diversify.

> Typically you are allowed by law to dispute chargebacks.

One caveat. For online businesses it is very hard to dispute most chargebacks. The card company typically wants you to FAX back a copy of a receipt or invoice for the charge bearing the customer's signature. That's fine for businesses like the OP's, which deals with customers in person, but for most of us who deal with customers via an online shopping cart...nope.

> I learned from previous experience, never have a single payment processor ever.

Note that if you are handling recurring payments then in order to have the flexibility to switch processors you need to either handle credit card storage yourself, or make sure whatever processor vaulting service you use provides a way to export the raw numbers in case you want to switch processors, or use Spreedly or something similar.

We do our own storage where I work. PCI compliance is a bit of work, but it is not as bad as most people think. (If you transaction volume is high enough to not be allowed to the the Self-Assessment Questionnaire, then it is probably as bad as most people think).

Every time it is time to renew the reserved instances at our hosting service that are involved in card storage and would no longer be needed if we used a vault at a processor or a service like Spreedly, we've taken a look at the number of cards we have stored and the transaction volume to figure out the vaulting costs, and so far it has come out cheaper to continue doing it ourselves.

Another issue with using a vaulting service is how to handle expiration dates. The expiration date printed on the card is the date after which the physical card is not supposed to be accepted, not the date that the number itself expires. If you have the card on file for authorized recurring payments, you can continue to charge the account after the physical card expires. But most gateways will reject a transaction at the gateway if the date you supply is in the past. Most gateways have some way to tell them you want to go ahead and try to charge the card even though the expiration date of the physical card is past. You want to make sure that when using such a card from the vault, you can still tell the gateway to try it.

Also make sure that vault works with the card updater services. Visa, MasterCard, and Discover (not sure about AmEx) provide a service whereby a merchant can provide a list of cards the merchant has on file, and the card company will tell them which are still good as is, which have new expire dates but the same number (and give the new date), which have both a new number and date (and give those to you), and which have had their underlying accounts closed.

You have to be able to give the updater service full credit card numbers, so if your cards are in a vault service, you'll have to have the vault service do the updater querying for you.

Way, way back I had similar sorts of problems with PayPal.

I was an early adopter of internet commerce but I got my fingers burned several times when companies made unilateral decisions against me and provided no simple means of contact between me and them.

I now refuse to use any super-duper payment system that does not have my bank as a buffer between me and them.

Call me a Luddite if you like. But I feel happier.

I have heard the same about Paypal. They shut you down without an attempt to clarify or any kind of explanation. I think that's a warning about a lot of tech-driven companies. They are great for most people but when something goes wrong you are SOL because they have saved money by having insufficient customer service.

I just want to point out that from my perspective the fact that this was flagged, and Stripe magically replied to the post here as opposed to getting back to them through customer service, on top of the fact they just took on so much investor money- this just screams Paypal 2.0

It was flagged by users, but I've turned the flags off. We are careful to moderate HN less, not more, when the story is about a YC startup: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

That said, people should remember that there are two sides to every story and account for the fact that the other side isn't available here. That makes me think there's more going on than meets the eye, especially since the financial space is regulated and there may be legal or institutional constraints on what they're able to say. If the issue were simply a failure to do good service, they would be smart enough to say so and correct it; it would be in their interest to do so and that's what they've done in the past. So there's probably additional complexity and we don't know what it is.

Agreed it’s utter bullshit how they deal with customers getting their banks to refund them and charge us a fee for it. When most times banks have an incentive to side with their customer

Oh my, I also was about to propose Stripe to a local boxing gym myself. This gym is also a 'not for profit' company, of which I'm a volunteer (unpaid).

Guess I'll scratch that plan!

Weird. You'd at least think you'd get a phone call about something so serious.

Instead it's the ol' support over Hacker News I guess.

When a company is giving you the total silent treatment it means they think you're a spammer/scammer and they think you'll use any sliver of information to avoid detection next time.

> Weird. You'd at least think you'd get a phone call about something so serious.

right? how many accounts are they shutting down every day that somebody can't pick up a phone?

Thanks for the article. Could anybody reading this suggest a reliable payment gateway and merchant service .. thanks!

Stripe

You might want to specify if you will be doing a high risk business such as

* a fitness studio

* recurring memberships

* any type of discount or free trial period.

From stripe's ban list:

"offering substantial rebates or special incentives as an inducement to purchase products or services;"

From a high risk provider:

"The main reason for the high risk tag is use of the recurring billing model for memberships. Customers usually give one-time permission up front for the business to charge them monthly until the customer cancels the membership. If customers skip over or forget about the terms of the authorization form they sign, these recurring charges might come as a surprise, leading them to initiate a chargeback against the business. This is a very common scenario for free trial models that lead into recurring billing. After a free trial, the start of an auto payment plan might catch the customer off guard.

There’s also the possibility of “friendly fraud”—when a customer abuses the chargeback system just to get their money back. Maybe they stopped using the membership and forgot to cancel. In any case, this can also lead to a chargeback against the business."

https://www.bankcardusa.com/health-fitness-merchant-accounts...

If you are going to be doing a business model that is not high risk - none of those items above are a yes - I would reach out to stripe and get things cleared up.

How about software SaaS which is charging monthly?

Depends on

1) how easy is service to cancel. Put your cancellation link online not behind a business hours automated phone tree.

2) how trial periods work. Send customer email 3 days in advance to notify them that billing will begin if they don't take action and amount of bill with an easy way to cancel if desired.

Some SAAS I think is always high risk, SEO tools, email marketing, adult services related etc? Someone probably has a better high risk SAAS list. Basically, can someone uses a stolen card, or even their own card and signup for this service, spend $10K blasting emails to people, then claim unauthorized?

Actual life hack: Don't email support. Email legal.

I have heard that is some cases it is worse...they assume you'll sue them so they'll avoid you

Imagine it from their perspective. There's a higher chance of actually getting sued if you just ignore them.

Following.. I have stripe integrated into one of my apps and so far I really like it. No probs in the many years working with this company. I'm happy to see someone from stripe is reaching out.