Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers

At 250k euros loss, you need to consult with a specialized lawyer. Someone who knows his way around electronic payments.

Stripe might be (or not, the laws can be crazy) in the wrong here, and it would be interesting if you take them to court or take a legal action to see what their reaction is.

This. I feel people in tech often forget the world outside the internet exists. And that laws exist beyond EULAs

I'm sure someone reads legal@stripe.com, with the right title you can probably have they call you in 10min.

Laws don’t enforce themselves, but this is more of a civil case which definitely doesn’t enforce themselves.

Without an idea of what it is that you are selling it is impossible to say whether or not you or Stripe are in the right here. Given that Stripe is willing to refund your customers that indicates that they do not want to be party to these transactions, you can then of course ask your customers to send you payment through some other means.

If you've shipped the goods before you received the payment that was a risk that you took upon yourself. If Stripe kept your money and did not refund your customers I would say the situation would be much more grave but apparently that did not happen.

You write 'If the payments do end up being refunded, we will of course be taking legal action and contacting media outlets in efforts bring this story to the public eye, and to hold Stripe accountable for this' -> but that's the wrong order. You've already been warned that Stripe will refund the customers. If you don't want that the time to take legal action is now and the first thing to do is to put a pre-emptive hold on that action until a judge has spoken about whether or not the refund can go through. Allowing the refund to go through without taking legal action is - pardon my French - about as stupid a move as you could make at this point.

Go talk to your lawyer, pronto, and stop making things worse for yourself by letting the clock run out.

Out of curiosity, can you be more specific about what you sell? Consumer electronics like vapes or consumer electronics like Alibaba hoverboards or consumer electronics like a quality, entry level set of computer speakers? Stripe seems to be pretty sensitive towards certain industries and I'd like to see if this holds true here.

I cannot be super specific due to the nature of business strategy.

If I share accurate info about what and how we sell things, It's very easy for opportunists and competitors to undertake us in this specific project while our processing solution is down temporarily.

What I will say though, is that we're not speaking vapes or anything borderline, more like kitchen and household appliances, and so on.

> It's very easy for opportunists and competitors to undertake us

This is nonsense, sorry. It really sounds like you're selling something Stripe would understandably want nothing to do with.

If you ask a community for help you can't expect them to play with half a deck behind your back and 'trust me' when your account is a brand new one. That is simply not how this works. Trust is a two way street, you don't trust HN to know what it is you are selling but you do expect help in solving your problem. Those two don't match, especially not because you use multiple Stripe accounts and have issues with both, that alone is a pretty big red flag. A kitchen and household appliances company that is above board would have zero problems naming their website, nor would they be classified as 'high risk' by Stripe.

> I cannot be super specific due to the nature of business strategy.

It says all. You are most likely a scammer or criminal.

Yep.

Search below for response from 'caitb' who works at Stripe:

> I work at Stripe, and we're already in touch with OP.

> We don’t comment on specific user cases for privacy reasons. As a reminder, facts presented in a public forum can often be misleading or untrue.

Along with:

> We were in touch with OP over email before this post was made.

> We know that confirming we review cases posted here provides an incentive for bad actors to post.

> We wish that weren’t the case–but we do pay attention to both internal case reviews and to any public complaints where users are having a bad day (or, in some cases, profess to be having a bad day).

And the resolution posted by OP below was:

> UPDATE : Stripe has just closed our account without further notice and refunded the whole balance.

So, this story is that Stripe just protected a whole bunch of people paying around $100 for scams worth up to $250k or so.

As an exercise everyone should spend some time on r/tifu, r/ChoosingBeggars, r/antiwork, etc and play spot-the-fakes, particularly when some story that hits the front page of reddit sounds very appealing to your biases.

Indeed. Another angle to consider: there are a 1001 ways in which people scam other people even if they have a website and it all looks legit to you that doesn't mean it isn't a scam or a way to process gambling or porn charges or to launder money. There are so many ways to do this that I know of because I come across them professionally from time to time and then there are untold ways that I don't know of. So without access to all of the information that Stripe has at their disposal it is impossible to know what's going on even if it looks legit. And Stripe is always going to err on the side of caution simply because no matter how big your business and how important it is to you their reputation, merchant account status and legal exposure is worth infinitely more to them.

It's really difficult to believe that you're basically selling ordinary household appliances but that for reasons of business strategy you can't even reveal what you're selling.

So do you not tell customers what you are selling either for fear of competitors? That might be why Stripe suspended you.

> I cannot be super specific due to the nature of business strategy.

How do you get customers if you tell nobody what you sell?

I guess what I'm struggling with is: if you're not saying who you are (HN account created 2 hours ago), and you're not saying what the business is, and you're not even sharing something like a Stripe account id or ticket number (some sort of identifier that might help Stripe support identify you), what exact are you hoping to get out of this post?

We all want to believe you and help out, but you're not doing us any favors.

> I cannot be super specific due to the nature of business strategy.

This is such a lie

You can't say what you sell but you have customers buying it?

Yeah, right.

Now we know why you got banned - you're a scammer.

Frankly I'm sick of seeing these articles on HN. You're not having technical issues with Stripe, you're having legal issues. Get a lawyer and get off of HN.

I also want to know.

I asked the last guy that raised a Stripe ticket on HN what they sold and they wouldn't tell us. Given lack of transparency seems fair to assume they've been deemed prohibited businesses by Stripe -- https://stripe.com/legal/restricted-businesses.

Every time someone posts one of these that seems to be the case. "Patrick Collison personally slapped me in the face and keyed my BMW for NO reason!" See comments where it turns out they're selling anthrax to baking blogs branded as instant yeast.

I am perpetually confused by these threads. If I was facing withheld cashflow in the tens of thousands, I'd have a lawyer ready to go. But here you are, like the other threads, posting on HN about it.

You also appear —as other threads have— to have carried on pushing money into this black hole long after the initial problems. If a payment processor doesn't start giving me my money, I stop using them.

As others have said, stop double-counting your losses. If you send out stock that cost you $100k, expecting $150k, your loss isn't $250k. You have lost $100k and some marketing. You might argue that you've lost potential sales too but if you try to write those off in your accounts, I can't imagine a tax authority that isn't going to audit you back to the stone-age for that sort of stunt.

Honestly the more throwaways I see making these accusations of Stripe, the less I believe them. If nothing else, you're an idiot for not limiting them damage earlier.

I must be stupid... but how a refunding of 150k makes a loss of 250k? I would assume the shipped goods are less than 150k (gain margin). That plus shipping is the loss. Shipping, assuming 150, you sold about 1000 items, which at 5EUR typical shipping ist 5k. Worst case, even with interest and all that you want... who do you come to 250k?

I do not want to defend Stripe (I hate all that kind of companies), but there are so many unclear details here. - What were those unauthorised charges? - What are exactly the goods you sell? - What is the time spread across those transactions were done? Is that one business day? a month? quarter?

I really cannot conclude stripe is shitty based on this post.

If everything is so clear and arbitrary like it seems in the post, is a no brainer to get 500k back in a court of law. So, relax.

We've sent out products to all the customers that have paid.

Stripe is now "considering" refunding all these customers, while holding 150k of our generated revenue.

Due to the products being bought and shipped, (and not even factoring in marketing costs) this easily equates to a total net loss of 250k for our business.

That's not how you count a loss. Your loss is the product you bought (not sold) and the time and effort spent on sending it, as well as possible marketing expense to get it sold. You don't recognize the revenue until the money is in the bank, especially not if you have a dispute with your payment service provider otherwise you are creating yet another problem for yourself, the taxman will want his due even though you did not receive the money. So stop recognizing this as revenue until you have been paid.

They were paid, Stripe has just frozen the funds and apparently intends to refund the lot.

No, Stripe was paid. Really, the basics here are pretty simple: until your IPSP has released the funds to you you have not been paid. The fact that Stripe intends to refund is a pretty strong bit of evidence that the company has not been paid yet.

One thing that people that use services like Stripe really ought to do is to make sure they understand exactly what the position is that they maneuver themselves into, it looks like a lot of this is driven by wishful thinking rather than understanding.

Legally speaking Stripe has the option to refund a customer during the hold-back period at their discretion. Technically you are not supposed to send any physical goods until you have received the payment. If you do so that is at your own risk.

If Stripe, or any payment processor was "paid" you would have to invoice them for tax purposes not the end user; and they will have to invoice and the end user and deal with Value Added and other taxes.

You should google the term 'merchant of record'. In this case Stripe is the merchant of record. If you bring your own merchant account then you are the merchant of record. In the first case it is Stripe that gets paid, in the second case it is you that gets paid. Either way, in this case the transactions will be reversed so it looks like soon nobody will have been paid. Stripe reduces your liability by acting as the merchant of record but the fact that that liability shifts to them gives them certain rights - and obligations - with respect to the funds, and a unilateral refund is part of those rights.

The moral of the story: do not enter into an agreement without understanding the terms and the practical implications of those terms when applied to you and the relationship with your customer as well as the transactions themselves if you don't want to be surprised by some of the potential outcomes.

And Stripe isn't a Merchant of Record. They even have a specific product to overcome this, Stripe Tax.

According to all of the information the OP has given they are in this case. If you have evidence to the contrary I'm all open to it but it does not apply here unless you have information that contradicts the OP in a believable way.

Also: note that Stripe has all kinds of technical countermeasures in place to detect money laundering and other terms violations and it may well be that everything looks totally above board to an outsider whereas they have valid reasons to deny a party service.

The evidence in the services that Stripe provide, they do not handle taxes for you. They act as a payment gateway provider with some software add-ons.

Yes, so? That doens't mean that Stripe isn't the merchant of record. All that matters is whose name shows up on the credit card statement. If that's Stripe - as it usually is because it is their merchant account - then that's Stripe. Bring your own merchant account and it will be your name that shows up. Stripe can be IPSP and PGP depending on the circumstances and the story the OP told here strongly indicates that they are using Stripe as an IPSP.

The difference between a payment service provider and a payment gateway is substantial, in the first case you likely won't ever see the customers card details other than what is required for shipping, in the second you will have all of the data including CVV and expiry and you will have to deal with the associated overhead.

Yeah I was also confused at that calculation, if there’s any loss here it’s just the material loss of the products that have been shipped but will never be paid for. I cannot see how the loss could be almost twice the sale value.

Agree that I have no idea how this person is calculating their loss at 100k over their revenue. However, generally as in GAAP, you would recognize revenue on shipment or when a service is rendered because that would be the period in which the revenue was accrued. For example, most companies that sell on terms like NET 30 will invoice AND recognize revenue on shipment; they would not wait until payment is received on the invoice. That is why there are [contra asset]/expense accounts relating to bad debt.

Waiting until funds hit your bank account is cash basis accounting and even in that case, I am not sure how having a third party like Stripe holding the money affects things.

Yes, you can do this. But in the case of the OP recognizing the revenue prior to receiving the payment makes them liable for the taxes on that revenue and that probably isn't a very clever thing to do.

If you're accrual basis like most companies _in the U.S._, you would be obligated to do this and not recognizing would be a finding on an audit. If not, at the end of the year, companies could ship goods out reducing assets, book the corresponding cost of goods sold, and not recognize revenue until the following year.

Let's say you had $100k in the bank before you started this.

You buy the product and ship it, costing you $75k. Your balance is now at $25k.

You expect revenue of $150k from customers. This would take your balance to $175k with net profit of $75k.

But Stripe refunds the customers, and the revenue never comes. Your net loss (excluding labor, marketing etc.) is now either $75k (the money that is no longer in your account) or $150k (expected balance vs. the actual balance).

It doesn't make sense to take the sum of those two. Your expectation was that the incoming revenue would cover the procurement and shipping.

Even that isn't right: if the original balance was $100k the loss can never be larger than that. You still have 25K in the bank so the loss is $75k, any other interpretation should not be labelled a loss, at best they are misguided expectations.

The 150k is a "loss" in the same way that the movie industry "lost" $500 million (or whatever it is that they claimed) to piracy: revenue that they think they should have gotten, but didn't.

Precisely.

I agree it's up to interpretation, but in this scenario, the seller has shipped a set number of goods that the customers have paid for. The revenue has been generated but not moved successfully through a service provider to the final destination.

So it's not just an estimate. The money is not imaginary, it has already been collected from the customers.

It actually got refunded (see title, and update by OP).

> Due to the products being bought and shipped, (and not even factoring in marketing costs) this easily equates to a total net loss of 250k for our business.

This is double counting, and not how you calculate net loss.

You can't take both a negative and a positive cash outflow, then make them both positive and add them together.

One reason Stripe may stop doing business with a party is if they do not believe that party is going to be around long enough to honor their warranty risks because Stripe is the merchant of record on these transactions. The inability of the OP to get basic bookkeeping terminology right would be an excellent reason to cease doing business with them, both as an IPSP as well as a potential customer.

Companies magically going out of business after getting their money is one of the reasons these hold backs exist in the first place.

Talk to a lawyer asap. Also, do your best to resolve the situation with Stripe in a non-confrontational way (people don't like to cooperate with belligerents even when becoming one would be justified).

My bank provider chose to terminate my business's account for a BS reason. No interest in resolving or discussing the situation in any way. Enjoy uprooting everything: find new banking services, change your accounting, all integrations, card payments, invoicing, account history, backups etc. etc. Ultimately I figured it out and it's nothing close to your scale, but for an independent contractor this would threaten their entire livelihood.

Financial institutions want to steer clear of all regulation and be extra cautious with KYC and fraud. They will always take their own side over their customers. There's inevitably a segment of false positives to be flagged as liabilities.

These companies can ultimately ruin your businesses and your product, due to malice (rare) or incompetence (less rare). Always have redundancies, where possible.

Here's the kicker when you had merchant account with an "evil" old school bank you could just walk over and talk to human.

Yes, but evil old school bank likely would not process 'card not present' transactions at all.

I had e-com store as a student in late 90s they processed em fine

I think any experience of the late 90's is no longer applicable today, banks have learned the hard way that high risk transactions and card not present transactions are not something that they have the expertise to deal with when the scope is global rather than local.

https://www.chase.com/business/payments/online

They'll just connect you with Stripe, authorize.net, braintree or some other IPSP.

Really, I don't see what this contributes to the discussion, I would assume that if the OP was able to sign up for their own merchant account they would have done so. To process six figure sums on someone else's merchant account is usually for a reason other than convenience because the fees are high enough that you will want to cut out that particular middle man as soon as possible.

Your merchant account can be with your bank and you just use authoriz.net as a gateway. Fees might be a bit higher than stripe but in case of problems you can talk to a human and resolve your problems.

I've been in that position for many, many years and not a single time has my bank been useful to me. The gateway people usually are able to help out, depending on what the issue is. And this across a multitude of banks.

And yes, it's a better solution than Stripe, assuming you are not a high risk merchant, in which case banks won't touch you.

Of course they do. Their APIs are just way worse and documentation can be really bad as you have to connect to decades-old systems. But once it's up and running they will honor their agreement.

I've had a front row seat to many occasions where they did not honor their agreement. Really, e-commerce is so much easier nowadays mainly because you no longer have to deal with banks for the basics. Other than creating your bank account (which, at the moment can take anywhere from three to six months depending on which bank you choose where I live).

Other than sympathy, I think looking for legal advice on HN is always a bad idea. You are expecting to hire a lawyer anyway, and you should let them handle what sounds like a very straight forward business dispute.

The reason for closure of both accounts is that our business is “high risk”. I’m not sure what this really means in our case, as we just sell consumer electronics in the $100-200 price range

No judgment here, but is it sex toys? Because US-based companies are just really weird about that stuff and treat it as crime-adjacent for no real reason other than historical prejudice.

EDIT: you answered my question while I was writing it. I think you'll get better responses if you specify that it's kitchen/household goods.

This is the Nth horror story I've seen about stripe. It's the new Google.

Good docs and a sane technical API make my life as a dev easier.

But I'd rather use a payments vendor that I can trust not to deep 6 my company a year later.

Any recommendations? Ideally they still have good docs and a sane API.

We have been using Braintree since 2017, and no complaints so far.

As the business grew, they have contacted us a few times for risk related reviews and asked us to submit supporting documents. But they don't hold the funds first (unless you don't comply I guess) which I find a better approach on how to treat your customers and establish trust.

As with all enterprise software buying, a key criteria is can I get a human on the phone to resolve the issue quickly-ish.

Microsoft and Amazon get this, with differing strategies. Google and Stripe seem to not get it.

Sure it doesn’t scale for the long tail, but it’s a necessity for any large enterprise account. Heck call it “stripe premium support” and charge an additional fee.

(I work at Stripe) If you have a Stripe account, you can navigate to support.stripe.com/contact right now and speak to someone. Chat is near instantaneous, email takes a little longer, and if you request a call it takes three minutes. If you're a developer, we also staff a Discord channel for more technical questions. This is available 365 24/7.

We also offer premium support if you need a dedicated support team for your business (https://stripe.com/support-plans).

When you introduce elements of risk (where fraudulent actors try to game our processes) it can affect how we speak about things.

I ran a business on Stripe before I joined Stripe and feel much more comfortable trying to get support here than at other larger orgs.

I used this channel and it was so frustrating it might not as well have existed . While the stripe team is always nice and the tech support is great, when I had a much less sever case of “stripe wants to destroy my business” I could get no straight answer or help from the support team

Instant response != Instant resolution. Getting support at Stripe is easy for easy things, but hard when it actually counts. Based on what we've seen here (and what I've personally experienced) getting your payouts paused while not being a fraudulent actor is not that uncommon. Any other provider would not be like "Your case will be reviewed by our specialized team at some point this week, or maybe the next, nobody knowns. In the mean time, please tell all those employees you need to pay next week to take a chill pill." Can you see how this can be frustrating? We process >$10M/YR with other providers and ~$2.5M/YR with Stripe. Our other providers show a lot more urgency when something serious goes wrong, while Stripe feels like they're too big to care if we leave.

This is heavy confirmation bias.

You look at the 2-3 bad stories posted on HN every month but ignore the hundreds of thousands of companies using Stripe that don't have any issue.

The issue isn't that stripe occasionally messes up. It's that apparently you can't get a human on the phone empowered to fix things.

Having your company destroyed because an automated system flagged it is an unacceptable risk.

With AWS, I can pay for a support contact and be confident my company won't blow up.

Stripe? Google? Not so sure

This is the exact same case of confirmation bias.

You've read 5 stories saying it's hard to contact support at Stripe, and chose to ignore the fact that hundreds of thousands have NOT raised this problem.

On top of that, if you follow the development of those stories, it usually becomes apparent that the account was restricted for a very good reason.

In fraud and account closure cases, pretty much all businesses are hard to contact.

Its frustrating. While I understand, businesses do not want to give hints to scammers, there should be some way for a person to get details. For small businesses, being given the silent treatment while their livelihoods are at stake feels like bullying.

When the bad story is somebody losing an amount equal to your life savings the 100s of success stories don't seem as important.

150K is only 0.00003% of the 350 billions that Stripe processed in 2020 (it's probably a lot more for 2022, like a trillion).

Those stories are always one-sided. It's very easy to believe that those 150K are indeed fraudulent, especially when the OP is so elusive.

I am small business owner and I use stripe since 2015 for a million+ of sales a year.

In the last year or two I noticed they have become more and more arrogant. I am talking early/mid 2010’s Facebook / Google arrogant.

I understand stripe is a successful company and it’s not easy to infuse a culture with so many people. But I surely hope they can turn this around.

Can you provide examples of what you mean? Ascribing emotional characteristics to companies is always a little weird to me, so it would be helpful if you fleshed this out a bit more.

There needs to be a dedicated “YC Portfolio Company Support” section of HN.

I second this - BTW, it's the second time I'm seeing someone pitch it this week.

The number of issues posted on HN that get sorted because somebody browsing the front page happens to work there is astonishing. And terrible. What's everybody else supposed to do?

I'm halfway towards simply flagging such posts. In the long term this simply won't scale.

No one will look into it I`m afraid.

The HN-as-customer-support-of-last-resort thing is pretty equal-opportunity, i.e. non-YC companies and YC companies both. e.g. there are tons of these for the inscrutable googolith. The difference is just that we downweight the submissions less when YC startups are involved (because of the principle outlined here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).

However, there have been so many of these recently that we're tweaking our approach to downweight them more—maybe not quite as much as non-YC-related cases, but more than we used to. That's because we're starting to see a community allergic reaction to the high quantity of these, and that's as close to a hivemind verdict as we get here.

Recent explanations:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34190090 (Dec 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33745192 (Nov 2022)

I work at Stripe, and we're already in touch with OP.

We don’t comment on specific user cases for privacy reasons. As a reminder, facts presented in a public forum can often be misleading or untrue.

Nice that you're looking into it, but it always irks me a bit when seeing that companies only really react when people complain online about it (and the complaint receives traction).

I had a request for my buildings management which they declined for over a year, stating that they wouldn't do it and I should solve it myself. After a year I wrote them a 3 star review on Google stating "Good people and no big issues, except [explaining my issue]".

I received a phone call the day after, they proposed a solution to my issue and now it's all good. But, only after I gave a not so perfect, public review on Google.

We were in touch with OP over email before this post was made.

We know that confirming we review cases posted here provides an incentive for bad actors to post.

We wish that weren’t the case–but we do pay attention to both internal case reviews and to any public complaints where users are having a bad day (or, in some cases, profess to be having a bad day).

Well yeah, OP mentioned that he was in contact, but that your solution of freezing their funds for that pretty long time frame was really weird to them. They tried to prove with tracking numbers, which apparently didn't work.

You now promise to look into it, why was that not possible before this post was created?

> We know that confirming we review cases posted here provides an incentive for bad actors to post.

That could be. Going through the comments in this thread I can read lots of complaints about Stripe Support. Maybe a significant part of the problem is internal instead of the mentioned bad actors.

But, I'll give Stripe the benefit of the doubt, that this new account which complains about an issue without wanting to go into detail about what they're selling is maybe not telling the whole truth. This still doesn't negate the fact that there have been a lot of posts about Stripe on here which were suddenly resolved after posting them.

And of course this is not meant against you personally, but towards Stripe as a business.

EDIT: See OPs response...

The only people that were in touch with me were support agents that were repeating what was said in the automated notification about payments being issued to customers after.

To me it looks like it took this post, a reddit post and Twitter mentions to get someone above the "normal" support to look into the matter, and put the automated refunds on pause while you investigate the case for a third time.

Nothing personal against you, but when almost 150k is held from us, and then decided by what seems to be a robot to refund all of these payments within 5 business days (although we've given you tracking numbers on the very first manual reviews where issuing refunds weren't even a topic) I hope it's quite clear that we're not professing to have a bad day, but rather that were acting in urgency to get fairly treated.

I'm not one to post on social media / publicly about my business generally, but when this is the only way to get your attention and I have roughly €250k euros at stake, what else should I do?

Hopefully we can resolve this (in a way where neither of us loses any money), without me having to take legal action against Stripe.

Do not fret. Most people who've received what they've expected to purchase will contact you to find a new means to submit any moneys. Not all will, but say 140000 euro, and items in the hundred range that shouldn't be more than 1400 purchases. This might seem like a big task, but a few days work communicating is well worth it. Yes you might end up losing some money, but some remuneration (most) is better than none. The only foreseeable problem are continuation of the online store for new orders and if you have stock that needs to be shifted soon due to renting storage space.

By the way, quoting tracking numbers would mean little to any processing company, because they tend not to accurately reflect customers who have their goods. I've been in that boat and burned a couple of times myself, one instance by a large apparently respectable phone company.

Starting to reconsider if I want to use Stripe with all these horror stories. Best of luck to you OP.

UPDATE : Stripe has just closed our account without further notice and refunded the whole balance.

When we go to our dashboard we get a query saying "Unable to load this view", so I guess that's €250.000,00 that have just vanished.

Please consider if you want to use Stripe for your business.

No, it did not vanish, it went back to your customers. Stop misrepresenting things.

Please consider if you don't understand the basics of doing business online whether or not you want to do business online. Your behavior in this thread comes across as wanting to damage Stripe regardless of the outcome of your dispute, that's an excellent way to end up precisely where you are now because you've left Stripe in a no-win position.

FURHTER UPDATE : We're now able to access the acocunt and can see that "only" €28k was refunded, I assume that Stripe's reasoning is that these payments were unauthorised.

Of course these payments are not unauthorised, and this can even be proven by most of them being 3DS authenticated.

We've also received 2 new notices about both accounts balances being refunded on the 11th, one can hope that these are automated responses, and that all that Stripe wants to refund is now refunded.

Step one is to have your lawyer do the talking, this instantly sets the correct tone regarding how serious this is to your business and how serious it will become for theirs if they continue to ignore you.

Second step is to collect all the information you currently have about verified deliveries, returns, etc. Forward these to your lawyer so they can answer any queries from Stripe council.

Then wait until they either fix the mess or indicate that it's time to escalate to actual legal action.

Also for the love of God (or whatever is holy/whatever in your religon) get the fuck off Stripe.

I've never used Stripe before so wanted to ask a clarification question.

Their docs [1] say that the payout schedule is 7-14 days after the payment. What prevents companies from taking out their money every week (or 2 weeks)?

For OP, is 250k euros weekly income? If so, it shouldn't bother them?

If not, then why didn't they take out their money before this happened?

[1] https://stripe.com/docs/payouts

> For OP, is 250k euros weekly income? If so, it shouldn't bother them?

Why not? 250k is 250k.

It seems like it's a potential "profit" of 44,000 € before taxes for that sale. 44,000 € is not even 20% of a guaranteed loss of 250,000 €, which is definitely outside "shouldn't bother" them.

Message them on social media and call/email them non stop. As a customer with a balance like this, they ought to let you speak to a real human.

The whole point of this topic is to bring stripes' attention to his/her case

Looking forward to seeing how this unfolds as we were considering using Stripe for payments on e-commerce store that ships physical goods. Really hope they resolve this swiftly for the OP.

OP commented again saying the money has gone back to the customers.

Why is this forum becoming a stripe help desk? It hasn't been long since the last "help needed" ticket here.

Because in the past it worked and because companies respond to public pressure, and finally because the Stripe founders are long time HN members.

What's going to be a good balance between convenience and financial safety?

Maybe start with Stripe because it's easy but use only the very basic functionality. If the business starts to grow, add an old style bank, one with humans to talk with, and move all the transactions there. Then say goodbye to Stripe.

Could that work?

Always use more than one IPSP so that you can spread your risk and if you ship physical goods hold on to them until the money hits your account and explain that to the buyer. If they're not comfortable with that give them an alternate, such as a direct transfer into your account.

It is ridiculous to me that HN is the sink for these issues. We have no context about what you were trying to do and you are making assumptions that you were in the right the whole time. You could have been violating ToS for all we know. What is the point of this thread?

>Obviously we also have tracking numbers to prove that literally every succeeded payment from account 1 have received their products, and we have submitted this to Stripe as well.

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So does this mean that any of your customers complained that they have not received what they paid for?

No, there's tracking numbers for all orders in both accounts.

We've received 1 dispute in roughly 700 payments, which was just a mistake on the customers end.

Generally, all of our customers are quite happy with our products.

offtopic question: Is there any arbiter-payment function exists in Stripe/Paypal?

It's the secret source of success of Alibaba's Alipay. Internet was full of scams in China, so the consumers aren't willing to pay to sellers directly, Alipay introduced this extra step, after payment, the fee is onhold, then the consumer receives the goods/services and checking with Alipay, the payment finally goes through. This allows the eCom owner and consumers to negotiate problems case-by-case and shop owners to gain credit over the time.

This arbiter-payment feature of Alipay is groundbreaking in the 00s.

UPDATE : Stripe just decided to refund a further €68.000,00 which puts my now total loss around €150.000,00 (Stock + marketing cost factored in).

Again, Stripe's reasoning seems to be that the charges are unauthorised, which is completely impossible since 80% of the transactions have been authorised with 3DS and the customers have gone through a so-called "challenge flow".

We will try and reach out to our customers and reclaim the payment, but I'm not sure how this will go, or how much we can reclaim.

I hope my experience can be a warning to anyone considering using Stripe for their business.

I had read previously you'd mentioned they'd refunded 28,000 and now another 68,000 ... bringing in my mind the total of 96,000 refunded so far to your customers. At this point counting the cost of items sent out only confuses the matter, because that only matters if most of your customers opt not to repay you albeit using something different. Clearly apparently good customers opting not to repay, would be odd in a regular online business.

If you've not heard from customers it's a fair guess that either no email was sent to them to inform of a refund, or your customers are not the sort of people who check their emails every day / week. Once your customers realise I guess it'll sort it self out, even if it's a bit messy. I dare say most of your customers won't be checking their bank balances every day, and even if they do they'd have to get a break down of the balance to work out where the extra money came from.

This is getting ridiculous. Can this stop being a Stripe support forum?

Bring them to court. It's enough money to make it worth the risk.

Bringing to court will take another $100k, probably tied up for years.

But the legal office could talk to the finance office and tell them they have little hope to win, so they release the funds before even getting started.

Another reminder to have another payment processor ready to go.

I need to see some horror stories about authorize.net or the big banks for comparison. At least the banks have staff you can talk with.

I agree, it is important to have at least two payment providers, ideally running them in parallel. It is still a problem if you're taking recurring payments, because you can't transfer customer payment details to the other when one of them stops service, but it's still better than having no backup.

> At least the banks have staff you can talk with.

Some banks do, some don't. I posted two days ago of a problem with a bank that turned out to have only useless staff you can't really talk with when there's a serious problem, unless you post to social media: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34234259

Ironically my comment was on another Stripe customer complaint HN article. The cash amout on that was even higher than the current one, $400k. Fortunately the issue with Stripe did get resolved, but the customer had to make their complaint public first and get it noticed by upvotes, before it was dealt with.

Still no working escalation for issues within stripe?

Why the Stripe have be to the good guy and regulate everything consumer do? can't Stripe be a payment processor only?

It's 'Stripe', and they have to follow the law as well as the rules set by the various payment methods that they allow people to use or else Stripe itself will go out of business. If you want more freedom you should simply get your own merchant account and use one of the gateways. This comes at a cost, you will need to be PCI/DSS certified and likely ISO27001 certified. Neither of these is particularly cheap or easy so it will take a certain minimum level of processing before this becomes a viable option.

Because they process credit cards and the credit card companies require them to. To a certain extent, national laws also require them to.

Corps and lawyers are a hand in hand relationship. You need to have a lawyer you can trust whom knows your business before you need them. Certainly you're not the only one, but likely when other corps have a problem it starts with a legal letterhead.

Whatever is going on, Stripe's behavior looks erratic and unpredictable based on OP's post. I would sure as hell avoid them.

I am sorry, I must be at the wrong place. I thought it is a tech news forum, but it is obviously a Stripe support board.

I feel like we see these posts weekly.

Yes, but the vibe usually isn't as strange as with this particular one.

I see this is the first and only post you have on HN. Since you shared with us the problem you have with Stripe, would you be so kind to share the address of your webstore so that we can make an idea about the stuff you are selling.

It is becoming hilariously unpolite to see all these complains revealing only half of the story.

One thing they left out - in fact lied about - is that they were already in contact with Stripe support over this.

Dear posters of these HN support threads, would you please also provide links to your stores/websites? At least hundreds of thousands people reading these threads every other day would know that the businesses are in fact legitimate, and Stripe is wrong.

All these anonymous posts might as well be competitor's marketing strategy. I know that maybe in Stripe's case it might be all true, but where are we going with all this blind one-sided outrage?

Whose the competition being pushed here though?

All the other low barrier to entry, no underwriting payment processors are either crypto scams or known to have poor support and randomly hold your funds (PayPal, Amazon Payments, etc).

If you're running a legitimate business, with a loss like this, can you even afford to advertise to current and future customers that your banking services provider investigated you and concluded your business is fraudulent, that you're facing a giant financial loss, a freeze affecting customer-facing services such as payments and refunds, and you might go under soon?

Companies in distress due to mistreatment by a financial services provider should be able to get the support they need without having to face the additional problems of a permanent stain on their public reputation that may not be their fault at all.

What is wrong with stripe? This is like the fifth post I’ve seen in as many weeks on HN

Well, they seem to burn their technical talent from both ends then act surprised when employees burnout.

Support (email, phone) is a joke played by people who selectively read your question and regurgitate a script, short of posting on HN your just not gonna get anywhere useful with Stripe :(

It's the new paypal.

I have some webshops serving local markets and transitioned to a local provider (mollie) after reading many posts like this. I found their APIs and documention, for which people always praise stripe, to be just as good and the support is better.

Yep. That’s the feeling I have. And we are using Mollie since 2005 (for micropayments) and after that payments. The api was always good and the people/support are real, not some ‘AI’ like paypal (and now stripe) and then ‘support’ who cannot help you because computer says no.

move fast, break things, ruin your customer's lives, but its ok you automated most of your service so you make lots of money

works out perfectly for stripe

All these fiascos make me wonder if there is any value left in the FAANG brand, apart from signalling to a particular segment of hiring managers?

Here we go again...seems a Hacker News thread is the only valid way of getting a customer response from Stripe.

It's the only way to get support from Stripe, their founders are HN frequenters and the support is script readers outside of that.

So they rake in the dough and provide the cheapest customer service possible. That seems to be the most important lesson on this.

We get to hear this again and again. Makes you really think whether to use Stripe and I am tipping to no. Too big business risk at this point.

What alternatives are there to Stripe that don't suck? I've personally had nightmare experiences with Paypal, and there is no way in hell I'll be using crypto

Standard merchant gateway that has a relationship with your business bank. Ensure you procure that relationship through your bank with someone you actually speak to, ideally face to face but atleast on the phone. You pay slightly more than Stripe and the APIs generally suck but you don't end up with these sorts of impossible situations.

Rates on standard merchant accounts are generally lower or significantly lower than Stripe if your processing a bit of volume ($10k+ a month).

Yeah this is true but it's heavily reliant on volume, on low volume Stripe came out on top last time I looked. I still went for a merchant account though, much less business risk and I can walk down the street and ask my small business account rep what is going on if something strange happens to it.

Read the other recent HN threads about Stripe customer mistreatment disasters, using the HN search box ("Stripe", sort by date). Each one has a similar question about alternatives, and in some of them people have posted recommendations for other providers they've had good experiences with. I don't recall which ones but there were more than I expected. A couple of people recommended Mollie this time around. I've never heard of Mollie before.

Next time I need a payment provider, I'll probably do that, collate the provider names, check out the recommendations, and of course like you avoid the ones I've had bad experiences with before, which are too many :/

Can we please do something about hacker news being used for customer support? It's getting tiresome to see these appearing on a regular basis

It‘s interesting for HN because on this site are many potential customers. I have a finished Stripe integration in addition to app store sales but at this point I might need alternatives

honestly I'd rather hear about stuff like this than not.

If it allows someone to avoid an unjustified $250,000 loss each time … I hope they come here every time!

EXCEPT, what I really wish is that large companies like STRIPE stopped treating gross account mismanagement cases as small frequency regrettable but acceptable outcomes.

How can any of us sleep at night with these deaf capricious overlords managing our important information & services?

It is getting dystopian. Welcome to Brazil (the movie).

The audience of HN is also the audience who will pick what payment provider they want for their new projects. Horror stories like this one are relevant to this audience (and why they get upvoted).

yeah man, I'm going to avoid Stripe now that I've seen this (or at least I'll treat them the same way I'd treat Paypal or an angry venomous snake)

I agree with the OP. Nobody should be choosing a critical dependency based on anecdotes like this, which tell only one side. If there were a post that aggregated such anecdotes with a more neutral stance, that might be more interesting.

OK, but what is the better alternative then?

Alternative to what?

But it's anecdotal evidence at best and at worst this person is only telling their side of the story

That is true, but we have heard many of these stories that could only be resolved by using HN. How many more stories are there, that we don't here about because the affected people don't know HN? At some point it becomes a pattern.

So there's a pattern because of stories you don't know exist?

It doesn’t matter that it is anecdotal in plenty of these HN support cases, the fact that this is possible at all is commonly what is atrocious (in other words, this should happen zero times). IE You can’t deflect a nuclear plant meltdown by saying we need to know how long it was running fine beforehand.

You don't even know if he is telling the truth. He didn't even reveal the name of his business, why are you so sure it's true?

If you can suggest a better way to reach an actual human at Stripe / Google / etc, I’m all ears.

Sometimes you get lucky and reach a helpdesk droid, but they’re not permitted to deviate from script. Posting to HN can put you in contact with someone who actually is able to do independent thinking, and take action too

Agreed. Do you have any ideas?

HN could ban posts asking for support, but then people don't get support and companies have even less incentive to create sensible support systems.

It's embarrassing for Stripe to have HN flooded with support requests, and that's a good thing.

That's what the voting buttons are for.

People should be encouraged to share these types of stories so we can hold these companies to account. Tiresome? Please refer to Tyler, the Creator's famous tweet if these posts are bothering you.

As technologists we should bare witness to the consequences our way work has in the world and seek to blunt them. You can personally opt out by ignoring these stories.

Maybe if HN made their funded companies actually provide any kind of competent support, desperate people wouldn't have to?

Well the Stripe founders read HN and still don’t care about getting their shit together. And I’m glad I keep seeing these—I have a client that wanted to add Stripe to their checkout and I’ll now be recommending against it.

I'm also not fond of using HN for this sort of thing, but for a non-bootstrapped business, 250k isn't peanuts.

As much as this is a request for acutal support from Stripe, I also do hope that readers who are in a business of taking online payments will become fully aware of the risk of using Stripe, since I weren't (and now I'm in a situation of possibly losing 250k).

> I'm also not fond of using HN for this sort of thing

Then don't.

Posts like these remind us that things can and do go wrong when working with these large companies.