Don't Use Stripe
It is one thing to say this is a red flag, fine... I hear you... no problem. a transaction multiple times the size... sure. I get it. However, A normal payment processor would then query you for documents authorizing the charge, bank statements, financial statements, some sort of procedure to remedy the issue. Stripe provides NO SUCH METHOD TO RESOLVE these issues.
There are reports of Stripe continuing to add "30 days" to the reserve hold past the initial 120 days, indefinitely. Stripe is taking advantage of a lack of regulation in this space to steal small merchant's large transactions. They see a big, outlier transaction and lick their chops, hiding behind KYC and "Fraud prevention" To hold your money indefinitely.
You cannot call Stripe. They do not have a phone number. Their support page on their website has Phone call and messaging grayed out. You can only email. If you email, you get robots. Even in the same email thread, a different "agent" (with a different name and everything) answers each time with not prior knowledge of your history. There are no ticket numbers to your support request; nothing tracking it. The robots respond with what is quite obviously a template response.
If you do a little bit of research about this topic, you immediately see this is a prevailing issue. Reports of Stripe taking up to $31,000 are all over the internet! Again, Stripe gives no manner to remedy this. There is NO ONE you can call. NO ONE you can talk to. More disconcerting, it seems that anyone who posts about this issue on reddit gets downvoted and teamed up against by established Reddit accounts, that I have to imagine are owned by Stripe. These account have some established reddit history on them, mainly talking about coding in PERL. It's a little sus.
In my case, I sent my EIN letter, Sales Tax Receipt, Articles of Org, Statement of Trade Name, Certificate of Good Standing, Bank Statements, Website links, Signed transaction receipts, and anything I could think of to Stripe to review. I just received robot-responses.
I challenge anyone here to connect me to a human being at Stripe that can tell me how to resolve the issue. It can't be done. This is a big problem and should be brought to the attention of small business owners, and regulators!
TL;DR: Stripe is a faceless enterprise with no humans you can talk to, no publicly listed phone number, and will allow your small account to operate just fine for a while. As soon as they see that you are growing (and thus your chances of leaving Stripe for a larger, more favorable processor) they will Freeze your account, disallow you to issue refunds, and hold your money indefinitely. You've been warned!!!
143 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] threadRelevant, see my "Stripe’s opportunity: Reinventing Customer Service" from a while ago. [0]
[0]: https://medium.com/@simon/stripes-opportunity-reinventing-cu...
I assumed that support and transparency were selling points of Stripe. If not, why bother? Just go with a good old local bank.
There definitely needs to be more regulation of fraud holds.
IANAL ofc...
They consented when they signed up. Read the terms. They have NO liability.
It's a serious question. In you layman's view, what do you THINK signing something means?
I’m not saying this is a sure winner: I don’t know the case law well enough to have an opinion. But I don’t think it’s capitalization-level obvious. And really the goal would be to get the attention of a human at Stripe who can just fix it.
In fact there is case law that confirms that.
That's what consent IS.
Also this is the biggest season for sales and tech companies in general are dealing with navigating an extremely volatile macro economic environment - companies are planning for doing more with less staff and Q4 is likely pushing the limits for the customer support of many companies.
It is frustrating having your money on hold and there is a meaningful business impact that can have, but if you have tens of thousands of dollars tied up in Stripe (or any other payment processor), may I suggest expanding your other credit facilities such as lines of credit and loans, to allow you to navigate these sorts of situations, especially during Q4.
Sometimes even, I send an email and they respond by phone.
The story state of credit card payments forces this solution. Card payments are not your money, it's a statement of intention that someone wants to receive your product, try it out, and then pay for it only when they have found it completely satisfactory.
Your processor cannot simply launder that to hard cash and be on the hook when a large wave of chargebacks comes crushing in.
Surely there should be a way to do consumer protection better and more granular, with an actual dispute resolution system.
> reality of dealing with payments online given the regulatory environment it operates in?
In my book not having a phone number and not attempting to answer and resolve the issue isn't "dealing with it". That would be not dealing with something.
I was curious and looked at some.
2C2P 02-026-3000
Adyen - no phone
Alipay +65 68307260
Amazon Pay - no phone
Apple Pay - no phone
Atos +33 1 73 26 00 00
Authorize.Net 1-888-323-4289
BHIM 1800-120-1740
BitPay 1-404-907-2055
bKash 16247
BPAY +61 130 036 8098
https://pastebin.com/Kmb6Ju1K
I couldn't think of an automated way of obtaining the numbers. Maybe someone else (you lol) has some idea or is willing to do a few lines of data entry.
How many calls before the sales department would take legal action against me? Would they talk with support first?
You don't keep legitimate customers by subjecting them to erroneous fraud mitigation. That's the end of the story. Stripe can figure it out, or they can die. "Stripe cuts 14% of its workforce, CEO says they ‘overhired for the world we’re in’" Stripe handled an estimated $350B in payments annually (as of 2020) with around 8,000 employees. JP Morgan Chase handles somewhere around $2T, with around 250,000 employees. They didn't overhire. They never had enough people in the first place. They certainly don't now. It's going to get worse, and it may not get better.
Stripe is a low interest rate environment corporation, with $2.3B in venture funding, which will not exist in 10 years. You give a great piece of advice: diversity your payment processing.
1. Has customer service
2. Doesn’t charge high fees
I feel like those two things are mutually exclusive, the high fees can be thought of as an insurance policy to ensure good cs. The lower fee options are like those fly by night insurance companies.
Everyone wants a fantastic experience without paying for it, turns out cs is very expensive, and even if stripe offered a paid support option, then we’d have people here complaining about being forced to pay to get their money back… no you took a discount service and now are being charged for premium.
2) On the back of my credit card there is an 800 number that I can call 24/7 and reach a human and get my problems sorted out. That's for my piddly 5 and 10 dollar transactions. For my checking account I can not only reach someone on the phone, I can go to a branch and sit across a desk from a bank officer in person, again with relatively piddly balances on account. OP has 10's of thousands on hold if the story is accurate: that seems to be deserving of at least as much attention.
3) I'm not a seller but on the buying side, it's also a huge hassle that I have to frequently jump through hoops and get some company's permission to spend my own money. The OP's story shows that the chokehold happens to sellers too. For me at least, bypassing that was a much bigger attraction of cryptocurrency than any of the cypherpunk weirdness was. (I never pursued it though). We need some kind of low-dollar payment product where the customer can choose to assume their own risk. I can understand if it doesn't extend to bigger transactions without qualifying the customer more extensively.
Not sure about other countries, the only downside is they have setup fees and don't usually accept low volume.
Low volume is really what make PayPal and later Stripe so approachable.
the service that got traction because paypal fucking sucks is now rapidly becoming just as bad
Will definitely be collating the few stories of this I've seen though. We have a couple of large clients considering moving from PP to stripe, and while slow and somewhat useless, they could always talk to a human account manager at PP..
You seem to be underestimating the power of fanboyism. If someone is a fanboy for a company/technology/whatever, they will defend it vehemently without even being paid for it.
> mainly talking about coding in PERL. It's a little sus.
But this now makes me want to ask you if you think those accounts are in the room with you right now.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur+smallbusiness/search?q...
Now my theory is that Stripe will be a tad more inclined to help developers who help them build their empire via integrations and platforms and such, while actual merchants are a dime a dozen (in their eyes). I also have a perception that they have become way more MBA-aggressive in the recent years.
Exact width of the window may be adjusted case by case and depends on the stuff you sell — e.g. if it's digital goods with immediate delivery it may be shorter, if it's physical goods it may be certain amount of days after delivery verified by tracking number. In my case I was working for a company that provided proxy auction participation support, PayPal forced 30d non-negotiable hold on all our transactions.
So, you may transfer it every night, but it's safe to assume that 25-100% of your monthly revenue going through PayPal is sitting there at all times.
My experience with this is that I sold an iMac on eBay, then a week later PayPal informed me that the person who paid in fact has stolen someone else’s login, and so they sent a debt collection agency after me to make me refund the money, even though I no longer had the iMac.
If it looks like duck...
> PayPal (Europe) S.à r.l. et Cie, S.C.A. is a credit institution (or bank) authorised and supervised by Luxembourg’s financial regulator, the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (or CSSF). CSSF’s registered office: 283, route d’Arlon, L-1150 Luxembourg.
Can't comment re PayPal specifically.
Paypal and revolut are 100% not banks, they are financial institutions or emis, They can manage your money but not lend out anything and they have to hold the assets at 3rd party banks.
It handles money. You're not supposed to keep money IN it, not for very long anyway. It's a path, not a destination.
Paypal is different. They are b2c and heavily advertise their wallet service. They have crypto and ways to earn interest off of it. They upsell insurance and credit cards.
How are they comparable?!
The quickest way to get Stripe support is by posting on HN. You should have done that first.
>...we start getting attention we get payments of $3300 and more.
Thinking of others that may encounter this issue, I wonder if it's possible to spread orders between separate payment processors based on order $ value.
Processor #1: low average order value
Processor #2: high average order value
That way each processor handles orders within 1 standard deviation of the 30 day average (or however you might calculate it). I've never handled inventory for ecommerce. Just wondering.
If that's not possible, should ecommerce sites only ever have a min - max per unit value that isn't too large? e.g. $10 - $100 unit values, with avg $50 orders. Not $10 - $1000 unit values, with avg $50 orders.
So, are there any open-source solutions available?
- kyc onboarding, getting and processing the docs and forms never goes smooth, can take 2 to 10 business days.
- integrating the gateway, 3k setup fee on average, plus dev cost for mapping the servers, doing the front end and the tests
- sometimes, due to being labeled a high risk sector industry, only trusted visa traffic, or an allocation thereof
And indeed, losing 30 percent would be the end, we operate with a 4 to 12 percent net margin, thanks goodness credit card payments are only 10 percent or so.
I am a total crypto sceptic, and the crypto psps are immature, but they are causing the least hassle.
They have a downtime for visa, lasting 3 weeks? Nothing you can do, the gateway still charge you one quid per failed TX.
The worst was a single chargeback collapsed a MID and the processor refuses or claims they will not honor the settlement.Something like 20k usd for a months business.
All due to them miscoding and the chargeback exposing their miscoding practices.
Is there any recourse for this?
Any fintech news outlet where they can be named and shamed?
You're right about the phone number "...Note: We do not have an inbound support phone number at the moment. Request a phone call to connect with Stripe Support by phone..."
In case you missed it, a callback can be requested.
https://support.stripe.com/questions/contact-stripe-support
https://stripe.com/docs/disputes/responding
It's a national sport over there to figure out new ways of getting people's money, whether it's peculiar made-up fees, or like in your case plain robbery under the ironical guise of crime prevention.