Tell HN: Stripe Destroyed Our Business after 7 months of building our product
Our website is (https://onclickcheckout.com/) and we are Stripe Connect marketplace account where we advertise for other Stripe accounts and get them clients without any upfront fees. We only charge when their customers pay them and we charge via application fee feature of Stripe Connect.
We use Stripe Standard Connect where if you have existing Stripe account you can work with us to get new clients
Few days ago, after integrating CRMs, 7 months of intense work on building our advertising platform and getting 5 clients (5 connected accounts) we finally went live and it was successful in terms of business where our tech brought 30k worth of sales in couple days, all that work finally paid off and I could finally pay our team as none have been paid yet
and today Stripe closed our account froze our funds and marked our account "fraudulent" and saying "unauthorized payments" and sent us appeal form which all you can do is upload company formation documents which we did and they automatically denied it
I need everyone to know the real face of Stripe, now if this issue cannot be resolved after all the work done, I need to find a way to pay our team or shut down the company and lose all my team
69 comments
[ 196 ms ] story [ 4675 ms ] threadIt's a common growing trend that as long as something mostly works for 95% of people nobody will care and all those who fall between the cracks will fall on deaf ears.
No, they're just in a position where they can afford a percentage of false positives.
Similar to PayPal and others, they are firm to minimize their risk and protect themselves too.
I know how frustrating and scary this is, I wish you luck in resolving it!
eg this -- they're trying to, per their site, get lots of credentials from Stripe's other customers. It's pretty obvious why Stripe is saying no, and extremely reasonable to limit things like that to established companies.
Quoting myself from 2 months ago:
The last time I paid attention to one of these complaints, someone was using stripe to sell cellphone accessories (and yes, at least on my Stripe application, they asked what I was selling.)
After selling accessories for a while, he then used it to sell a minivan, and had a tantrum when Stripe -- quite reasonably -- said this flags all the flags, and Stripe was going to hold onto the money until they were sure things were kosher.
Getting dollars before multiple months post transaction basically leaves someone holding a bag of risk, and if you act shady AF, you can't be surprised if Stripe declines to hold that bag of risk for you.
What you’re describing isn’t how Stripe Connect is usually used. Who submits the payment details to Stripe, the purchaser or you?
Age means nothing. A simple email to `sales@stripe.com` could get you a meeting with an account rep to help understand your risk.
"Contact Sales" is on the home page, directly next to the login button...
In terms of contacting sales, should I specifically explain this issue or contact to get account manager? The only thing I need is to get our account re-enabled and get back to doing actual business
For one thing, your home page is full of little English errors. I'm not saying that makes it fraudulent, but I wouldn't trust you with my money.
Next thing: your HN post is unintelligible. You "advertise for other Stripe accounts and get them clients." What does this mean? You run ads?
Last: you're blaming Stripe and you want us to know the real face of Stripe. Who are you? The leader of this company? Did you run this statement by your team? You want to be between the customer and Stripe. You are not presenting a Stripe alternative I want.
It seems as though you made a Stripe epiphyte company and insisted that Stripe play by your rules. I don't know who's morally right here but you're not playing with power very well.
Example, you have a task management software and you are looking for web developers, we bring you those clients without any fees upfront and only charge you application fee (% of your sales) after clients we brought pays you
We usually do b2b sales with each connected account, so landing page does not play a big role in our sales
> Sales of online traffic or engagement
And, imo, also this one:
> No value added services including sale or resale of a service without added benefit to the buyer
I'm sorry, everything about this looks like a scam.
You can email the mods to get an official answer, but it's almost sure they will just reply that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - these are guidelines on what is and is not appropriate on HN. they can help guide you toward what are appropriate posts and comments.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html - FAQs that answer a lot of the questions that you've been asking.
https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html - the (very specific) rules on what "Show HN" is, and why and why not you would post to the special "Show HN" section of HN.
I would recommend reading them thoroughly before continuing to respond, as it might help temper some of your comments and the responses to them.
If someone asked me what to use for payments on a new project, I don’t think I’d feel comfortable suggesting Stripe, based solely on what I keep reading about the company on HN. That itself also feels a bit weird, especially without a clear alternative.
I myself have used Stripe for a few tiny things over the years, and have never had an issue, but I’d be surprised if I’ve put more than $100 total through the platform.
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Edit: The comments some have about the legitimacy of the OP’s business may make this particular case a non-issue, to be fair.
I get why financial companies don’t want to give out their reasoning, because it would help bad actors work the algorithms. On the other hand, it’s an awful experience to be banned when you are a legitimate user and have no recourse.
Maybe we need some sort of regulation that requires fintechs to provide an audit service where a user can have their transactions reviewed for legitimacy by a human?
Sorry y’all had to go through this.
Not taking the time to use proper spelling and punctuation in your text does not really signal that you care much about others.
How are you sourcing leads/customers?
We usually do b2b sales with each connected account, so landing page does not play a big role in our sales
Think about this:
* Stripe banned you
* You appeal
* Some support person at Stripe has to make a judgement. They know nothing about you. They go to your website.
* That support person gets a page that reads like a quickly built scam site.
* Support person goes "Yep, looks like the system flagged this correctly".
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I see you making excuses why your BE team can't manage the website. Stop.
Why is the BE team managing the website? Why aren't you using squarespace, wix, weblflow, any of the point and click website builders? Why aren't you moving that responsibility to somewhere else? Sales? Founder? Literally anyone but the developers.
> we needed backend to be built for the site and with Squarespaces, Wix and others you cannot have strong backend system.
You don't need those to be coupled to each other. Build them as separate systems?
You have a super easy migration path:
* Your currently using a root url for onclickcheckout.com. Not convention, but not necessarily problematic.
* Setup Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, etc on "www.onclickcheckout.com" (e.g. "www" sub-domain).
* Have the root for "onclickcheckout.com" redirect to "www.onclickcheckout.com". Now, your serving your app and marketing site separately.
* Even better, you're small. Migrate your "app" to "app.onclickcheckout.com"
> we don't even sell via landing pages, our own sales process is manual and we recruit clients manually, doing zoom calls with them and qualifying them
I literally cannot believe this statement. I can't believe you believe this statement either. The only way I could possibly imagine this being true is if you do your sales under a different brand.
Let's say I'm a prospect. I get one of your messages. I'm intrigued, but I'm also busy. Before I schedule a meeting with your team, I want to figure out if it's worth my time. How do I get more information?
It sure as hell isn't by replying to your outbound sales reps. That's only going to encourage them to bother me even more.
I'm going to your marketing website. I'm figuring out what you sell and how it works. The fact that your marketing site _sucks_ means I'm not even getting to the point that I want to follow up with your sales rep.
I mean maybe there's more to this, but that is the impression I get from the landing page.
Our tech worked and made 20k sales in 3-4 days for our clients after 7 months of work but now Stripe closed our business for no reason
What I can at least advise here, as someone who is a developer, but, also used to writing a lot of “copy” for my company, is that you hire someone who is a professional copywriter and who can fully proofread your texts.
I'm speaking as a European, non-native English speaking/writing person: there is something that feels extremely “sketchy” when reading English written content that doesn't feel “native”-ish. Maybe this is just my perception as a foreigner, but, it can truly, really affect the traction you get versus what you expect or could get.
> Why make things so complicated when checking-out? We help you provide the fastest way for your ONline users to checkout as fast as possible wherever they’re located -- It only takes ONE click!
This is the line from your website, I see two major problems:
* Your building a product that essentially competes directly with Stripe. I'm not sure on Stripe's specific terms, but most companies do not allow you to use their platform to compete with them. If they don't explicitly disallow it, it's often in some ambiguous term. I don't see how you ever expected to build directly on Stripe (or another "developer friendly" service). You need to work at a lower level where the provider doesn't offer a directly competing service.
* Caveat. I don't fully understand what your doing. "It only takes ONE click" screams "we're extremely risky and don't take proper measures to ensure transaction validity". Fraud is a major problem for Stripe (and all online transaction services). This line reads a lot like you'll be bypasing Stripe's protections and enabling risky transactions. Stripe can't allow that type of risk.
I know it's easy to be an armchair critic, but these seem like pretty obvious risks of the business you went into. Complaining that Stripe killed your business is not genuine. This is basic risk management that failed.
So...either:
* You're advertising a service on your website that you cannot provide. Shady...but maybe not fraud
* Or, you're planning to compete directly with Stripe
Being blunt, it's extremely hard to understand what you're trying to say to anyone on this thread. Your sentences are broken and you're referring to a ton of things that nobody knows what they mean.
It's nearly impossible to dig yourself out of a hole when nobody can understand what you're telling them.
- you run advertising and lead gen on behalf of clients using their CRM (their domain email/outreach)
- and require Stripe for attribution, and to remit payment from client to you
That's most likely triggering Stripe's TOS.
For something so core to your business, did you have a discussion with Stripe if this was allowed?