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Comment by smca_ | Hacker News Reader

(Sam from Stripe here.) Sorry for the issues so far. Could you email me more details at smca[at]stripe.com? I'll dig into this.

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I will send the full details/email chain tomorrow morning. I appreciate you looking into it, but why does this type of interaction require a HN article for a response? Why do none of the regular methods go anywhere?

They don’t care about fixing your payment problem. They care about fixing their PR problem.

Not to pile on poor Sam here. This is a common thing in the finance industry, and tech, and basically everywhere.

With thousands of employees you’re bound to get some (say 5-10%!) which are outright bad at their job or malicious.

The fact the founders quickly offered assistance directly, when they’re business is worth tens of billions is at least worth giving the benefit of the doubt. Even if it’s just for PR, they’re at least doing it.

> Even if it’s just for PR, they’re at least doing it.

Why the hell would you praise a company for an empty gesture? You're defending bullshit like it's a good thing.

I never suggested they were doing an empty gesture.

I’m assuming they’ll fix the problem, even if it’s just for PR purposes.

You should read more of the comments, including at least one that explicitly states how a founder reached out on HN only to never reply via email. It's been documented as an empty gesture, aka bullshit.

Anyway I misread your previous comment, sorry about that.

Would PayPal give the same response? At least with Stripe you know if you kick up a stink on Hacker News someone there will respond, not that this is ideal but I wouldn't expect to hear from any PayPal employees here.

You might have a point. But I think it’s moot because the overwhelming majority of wronged customers won’t or can’t put up a stink on Hacker News or equivalent. So the difference is a sliver.

PayPal let’s you manage your subscriptions on your end iirc.

Yep, is a screen in their consumer-site that shows all active billing plans. Two clicks to cancel. And that page is easier to find now (was buried before)

Yup. It's so obviously better for the consumer (and reduction of consumer support burden) that it's unbelievable that Stripe, or credit cards for that matter, don't have it.

For Stripe to offer that they would have to expose a "Stripe account" for buyers (the same thing the linked article complains about PayPal doing). For cards to do that they would have to move to only accepting merchant specific tokens you can revoke individually instead of the current state where the merchant (or their processor) has your card number.

They still have no API to allow me (as a seller) to check the status of a given subscription. Unbelievable.

Always takes a while to find that page though - why can't your active subscriptions not be on the page when you log in...

Last time this happened, OP replied to the Stripe guy something like "you said the same thing when i mentioned this on HN three months ago, i emailed you, and nothing happened". So with Stripe you might well get a response here, but that's not to say you'll actually get a resolution to your problem.

Assuming the thread gets enough upvotes to be noticed, anyway. That could mean posting at the right time of day, on the right day of the week, following another related story that helps drive more readers to check it out.

While it’s a fair point that with PayPal, you are almost entirely SOL, whereas with Stripe you at least have a chance, it’s not a tenable solution.

Putting out a fire on HN before it gets more press is something anyone would do so it basically means nothing. Now, if a founder commented on here "Don't bother sending me your details. I've un-fucked our support system, just submit a ticket again" that would get my respect.

I’ve talked to one of the founders of stripe on the phone after tweeting a complaint about their product. This was probably ~2014 but I’ve been an advocate for them ever since. It feels like a personal slight to read this blog post. Hopefully, they fix these issues because I like feeling good about using stripe.

Put simply, it shouldn't. I'll help fix this when you have a chance to forward on. (We stop recurring payments when a business closes their Stripe account, which looks to not have been the case here.)

If they closed their Stripe account I wouldn't be here ;)

The problem is they decided to leave up their Stripe account and just stop replying.

Assuming user has issued chargebacks 7-months back to back — why would this not be a signal Stripe needs to understand why and not keep charging the customer; one would think even one charge back from a vendor for a specific customer subscription would require re-authorization by the customer being charged prior to Stripe sending another charge.

What am I missing?

Just to play devil's advocate... It can be hard to know that there's a problem if it doesn't get escalated to the right people.

I'm sure most devs have an experience where something is broken for weeks before you happen to overhear someone talking about the multi-step workaround for a 5 minute code fix.

I think the same kind of issue applies.. Support teams are encouraged to not escalate, if they do, it often goes to a higher level support (but not any developers/business people). They find a clever solution and that becomes the common practice. It's not until a big stink is made that the right people are aware of a possible problem, and perhaps only then investigate the scope of that problem, and realize it needs prioritization.

Of course, this doesn't answer why the support team didn't even read the email to see you're not asking for a password reset... But might be a contributing factor.

Real world example: Mastodon would toss out and stop updating home feeds to save resources after a period of inactivity.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/5634

So people came back to empty timelines. Terrible UX, but until someone both experienced it and mentioned it, no one with code access realized how bad this was for returning users. Now there's a friendly message letting returning users know what's going on.

I once found out that an admin person was spending a couple minutes many times a day to open a user profile, find half a dozen different fields and copy them into a word doc template and then printing to a pdf that she emailed to the user. I added a button “generate pdf” for her and she was thrilled.

Following up here, do let me know if I can help. I haven't received anything to the email address, let me know if there's another way to help get in touch.

Hi Sam from Stripe, how about having a Stripe internal meeting about how Stripe support shouldn‘t consist of "X from Stripe here." HN posts? Are you aware "X from Stripe here." has become a HN meme?

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