https://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/wa1zob/dont_...
"When you sign up for your Stripe account, you had to state what business you were using it for. If you're doing business with your Stripe account that is not related to what you sign up for, then there are reasons why Stripe is now holding your money."
It's listed in Stripe's terms and conditions on Prohibited Items:
"Use of Stripe products to facilitate transactions on behalf of another undisclosed merchant or for products/services that were not disclosed in the merchant's Stripe account application."
From the reddit post, the demand appears to be to not hold the money for 120 days, and there's no reason for Stripe to agree to that. He also appears upset that Stripe reviewed his company docs after he violated his agreement with Stripe by selling a car, rather than the cellphones he told Stripe he sold.
Last car I purchased (granted a) it was brand new b) I'm in the UK) I purchased the car using my debit card (I kept the recept for ages until it faded cause it was novel to me to have such a large card transaction on a small thermal printed receipt :-P)
So I'm just wondering why a 2nd hand vehicle sale would be a huge liability thats all.
I kind of agree - I don't see why manually reviewing a transaction that probably violates their agreement with Stripe should be prioritized by Stripe - even if the transaction would eventually emerge as legit (not fraudulent and not chargeback-able). Because such a manual review would entail a cost to Stripe that is being forced upon Stripe by the seller's actions.
Of course it may eventually all get settled in the seller’s favor in court, but in the meantime the buyer has their vehicle and their money back and it’s on the seller to track them down and sue.
So people tend to do person-to-person used vehicle purchases in cash-equivalents (cash, cashier’s check, etc) so that there’s no worry about the money disappearing after the buyer drives over the horizon.
At which point you would give the documentation showing that that it was a as-is purchase and a legitimate transaction.
But as I said above, this could happen to any card transaction not just used car sales.
A used car dealership is better positioned to spend time dealing with chargeback disputes than a private seller, but why bother with extra work when you can just put up a sign that says "no credit cards" and never have to deal with it?
The person having the issue with stripe clearly initally thought accepting payment via card was fine, the purchaser hasn't issued a chargeback as far as we can tell, the transaction itself was flagged by stripe.
EDIT: just to be clear. or atleast try to be more clear. I'm not against Stripe "holding" on to the cash for a while, it was an abnormal transaction on the account for an item not normally sold by the seller (as they used Stripe as a back up method as their primary provider was down).
I was just asking the question why would a used vehicle sale be deemed as a huge liability for a company selling their old company van to process via the card network (not your avg joe selling a car from home who might not want the hassle - cash is king for as-is sales at the end of the day) because the fact it was a used vehicle was the reason the person I was replying to stated as the prob cause.
EDIT2: Allow me to word it like this. If the company wished to sell off old networking gear and/or servers "as-is" because they were no longer needed. The size of the transaction and the items sold would be unusual for the business to be selling which may cause the transaction to be flagged for further inspection/validation/hold on the funds just to be on the safe side (Thats fine, I get that, they were doing transactions outside their normal operations and tripped some safeguards).
But I just don't see why the item(s) themselves (the network gear/servers) alone would be such a liability to justify the hold, servers and network gear get sold as-is online all the time, so why would a used vehicle be any different? The person I initally replied to was saying that because "a used car seems extremely likely to cause a chargeback". I just don't get the "extremely likely to cause a chargeback" part.
In this case, my judgment (as a small business that uses Stripe for similar-sized SaaS payments) is that they acted completely reasonably.
It's also not terribly surprising that someone who develops familiarity with one tool will then apply that tool to new situations. The main problem here is the ever-growing financial censorship regime / decommodification push that insists companies should be prying into their customers' business.
When it comes to chargebacks it's not just customer experience (reputation damage due to fraud) and liquidity risks that Stripes or other payment providers are protecting themselves against - but also the actual support cost of handling each chargeback too.