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Comment by borat4prez | Hacker News Reader

In my experience Stripe has very poor customer service. Hopefully they spend some of this money in that department.

Trying to talk back and forth through e-mail because they won't give me a number to call about sales trying to get a lower rate because my volume of sales is greater than $80k+ monthly, waiting 24+ hours on average for a reply and even 72+ hours on one occasion, finally gave up on them and went with another payment processing company. This happened over the past month. Kind of disappointed.

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I'm very sorry about that! The support team has expanded a lot this year; we're working on it. Feel free to email me directly if I can ever help -- patrick@stripe.com.

Please be more active on IRC. Right now it is a guy called 'markin' that is doing all the support, and he isn't even hired by you.

He says he is happy with the t-shirts and stuff that he have received, but it would be nice with a more direct route to actual employees.

I've spoken to some Stripes about it, getting on top of IRC is definitely something they're working on and some hints of that are showing with the new developer support position.

I'm always happy to help out, Stripe's a fun and easy platform to develop upon, and its always fun to see what other people are building, see how they're using Stripe, etc. I definitely think I've learned as much helping as I've taught.

I will take an invite to the infamous Taco Tuesday though :p

Seriously, thank you for all the help you've given to those of us who've freely taken it on IRC. I wish you were a Stripe employee, in all honesty.

markin and wsmoak have both done exceptional work over the past six months or so. It would be awesome to have both of them on Stripe's payroll if that's a thing they want.

I wish I could throw all of my karma at this. I would really love more support in IRC, especially since I think fully owning some fanatical support for a developer-focused company can only be a good move. It'd also end up meaning a much better product.

Thanks for reaching out. Unfortunately, it's a seasonal business so the bulk of our sales comes in November and December and needed to get something besides PayPal checkout implemented before the Thanksgiving rush. It was just dumbfounding how long it took sales@stripe.com to reply to my e-mails.

The last e-mail we sent was November 25th at 5:50pm and didn't get a reply until November 30th at 5:03pm with "Thanks for clarifying, and I apologize for a delayed response on my end." ..by that time we already found an alternative, got it set up and installed in less than an hour.

What did you go with and how is it working out for you?

It's called PayStand and don't have any issues so far. Not sure if you're familiar. It works for what we need, a little higher of a rate we were looking to pay (we don't push the transaction fees to our customers which is an option of theirs), but had to implement something in time for the holidays.

Fascinating. Was completely expecting you to say Braintree. So they look a little like a blended monthly fee and transaction fees with the benefit/incentive being to help you drive as many transactions as you can via non CC options so you aren't paying 2.69% and 30 cents etc.

Interesting, haven't heard of them surprisingly. Although it looks as they're a PayPal company.

Yep, they were acquired by Paypal.

Do you plan to offer phone support?

Yes.

Awesome! That's the number one requested thing in the support IRC channel.

FWIW I generally have had excellent customer service experiences with Stripe. Often receiving responses within an hour after sending them at 2 am.

In fact, once an employee out of the blue sent me a mockup showing me how I might use a whole new feature, completely integrated into my sites js and html structure.

I was e-mailing sales@stripe so maybe that is a different department than their regular customer service. Sorry I did not clarify. I'm sure they're doing a lot of things right, I just had a bad personal experience.

Yeah I've actually emailed support about the same question and got a quick response back.

While I have no experience with Stripe, it feels like this is a common phase to go through for nearly every growing company :-/

Not my experience at all. Haven't tried recently but previously they've always been willing to help and even pretty complex technical queries have been answered fast. I didn't need phone support though.

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