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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Is this is "StoreCycle"? "Instant cash payouts for Shopify sites"?

How did you come to that conclusion? Sounds restricted anyway.

It's the most recent company listed for someone with the same handle. I haven't come to any conclusion, hence the question mark in the comment.

Not OP but username is pjyancey, some light googling brings us to:

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/storecycle

And https://storecycle.io/ (which may be down due to the story above)

Although the Linkedin description doesn't quite align?

"Have an e-commerce brand built primarily on Shopify? Get a free, no-obligation cash offer for your business soon as 24 hours. "

Maybe they pivoted?

Yeah you beat me to it. I think OP scrubbed it from his LinkedIn.

This may not be correct because OP actually has StoreCycle on their Linkedin but only until Sep 2022. So this may be a new/different venture.

You mean to tell me OP's business was actually shady and deserved to be shut down?

surprised_pikachu.jpg

Hmm I'm not saying anything like that?

Yes me, but that's unrelated. Different biz.

A minute ago it was "Not me, no." Does HN keep comment history?

Maybe he forgot his name...

I think the change in comment tells you all you need to know...

Not officially, but: you're right, the original response was "Not me, no."

Gotcha. What can you tell us about your business? For every story where someone has had a real problem with Stripe, there's another where, had you posted "can I reasonably build this business on Stripe" on HN, the whole thread would be people telling you "of course not". You say you ran a major marketing campaign, but I can't find evidence of any startup other than StoreCycle associated with you, so you'll need to cue us a bit here.

> had you posted "can I reasonably build this business on Stripe" on HN, the whole thread would be people telling you "of course not"

Does this justify refunding money for services rendered and goods provided? Refusing to process further transactions when someone is found in violation of terms/policies is obvious, but straight up returning money? On top of that, does Stripe not know who they do business with? I would assume you get asked what you're selling and have a chat with someone who determines whether you're legit or not.

In a company I worked for, there was serious KYC from our payment provider before we were allowed to process customer funds.

Yes, it does. There are kinds of businesses that can be run in good faith, but not on Stripe, because it's impossible to distinguish in those kinds of businesses the good actors from the bad ones. Positively, not normatively, the fact is: that is the retailer's problem, not Stripe's.

How so? Why does Stripe process payments when you're small, then fuck you over when you get more traffic? Why can't they detect this upfront, assuming there's no misrepresentation on the retailers part?

Presumably because underwriting happens in stages; further, the universe you're stating a preference for is one in which it's much more difficult to get a payment processor at all, because the fact of some businesses being "shadier" than others doesn't change.

Underwriting is what happens when a business works in part by putting up some of its own money to smooth things over for its customers. Payments is an underwriting business. For an example of what happens when you do an underwriting business that would never cause anyone on HN to complain, see: FTX.

But, really: who knows? They haven't told us what the business is.

> the universe you're stating a preference for is one in which it's much more difficult to get a payment processor at all

Isn't this the world we live in? A bank will ask you these questions when you open an account with them, why can't Stripe? Because growth?

Edit: Also, much harder? Filling out a questionnaire a human looks at, then takes a cursory glance of where you're registered, what you're registered for and what your website looks like? That doesn't sound like much work for the upsides.

This smells like the classic "There's nothing we could do, dude!", when a company can't be bothered to do due diligence, then dumps all the externalities of that on someone else. Stripe could do this, they just don't, as it makes more money, ruining (possibly legitimate/legal) businesses in the process.

A bank isn't going to do anything with your business that you just set up that wants to accept credit cards over the Internet for things. I'm not sure what we're even talking about at this point.

There's a good comment upthread about alternatives to Stripe, of which there are many. The good ones distinguish themselves by being the kinds of places where businesses like StoreCycle can't get an account in the first place.

In summary: the words "possibly legitimate" in your comment are doing most of the work of this entire thread.

Bottom line: Why didn't stripe detect this business wasn't "legitimate" sooner?

The timeline on this post is days.

The timeline during which Stripe could have detected this is _months_.

Clearly not.

Caught red handed

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