Comment by southbaybox | Hacker News Reader

Comment by southbaybox | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

@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 :-)

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