Tell HN: Stripe shut down my 4-year business with no explanation

Go check out CDG Commerce / Quantum Gateway. API and customer service is FANTASTIC! They’ve been around a VERY long time and actually care about their clients. It’s more traditional processing, but they work with a great number of online businesses.

You've been in business 4 years, and it's never occurred to you to look into alternate payment processing? Surely you saw there was a risk of this?

I use Braintree as mentioned, but only for Paypal.

I could technically switch over all new payments to go there right now, but I have 4 years of customer data in Stripe that would be horrible to migrate.

In particular, dozens of renewals happen per day that are now being lost.

I don't use Stripe; assuming you still had access, how hard would exporting that data be?

I'm also curious how rough the translation and reimport would be if you had an alternative, ready to go solution. "The customer DB" is sacred and untouchable to many businesses, and capturing that "as a service" is certainly a danger to the continued operation of a shop.

I have all the information but would be unable to charge their cards, as that information is stored in Stripe and I do not store credit card information.

Manually call every customer, explain, and beg for details to re-enter?

20 years ago our shop was running a conference, and had offered folks a "pre-payment plan" for the signup fee; where they could pay the $495 or whatever in 3 installments. We ran this for a year, and then a month before the conference was to happen the AMEX processor we were using decided they didn't like our politics, refunded all the outstanding charges we had, etc.

Sorting out who had paid what, if someone had paid with another card, or wanted a refund; was an absolute nightmare. Only about ~500 people iirc, but the fixups kept consuming time for months after.

(Edwin from Stripe here.) Just saw your email. I’m sorry for the trouble—we’re looking into this now.

You have a point but instead of blaming *edited from shaming* the OP, I would first worry about why Stripe cannot be more clear on what the issue could be. If the business was legitimately operating for 4 years, Stripe should do a bit more than just closing the account. Stories like this makes you wonder if aggregators like Stripe become too risky and you instead could be better off getting a merchant account of your own directly from a bank.

Shaming? I apologize, I was asking a question, which the OP kindly answered with more detail. I'm often kindof a jerk; OP had a problem that i found interesting, so now there's ^two^ problems.

A merchant account has several advantages; you might well find a person to talk to in case of conflict and confusion, possibly even the same person over time. The fees are lower too, I think.

Thanks so much, Edwin.

Just some feedback from me. Here's email 1, which looks automated: > Our systems recently identified charges that appear to be unauthorized by the customer, meaning that the owner of the card or bank account did not consent to these payments. This means that we can no longer accept payments

Email 2, which feels like a human looked at it: > Thank you for completing our verification process. Unfortunately, after conducting a further review of your account, we’ve determined that we still won't be able to accept payments for xxx moving forward.

Finally email 3, definitely a human: > It looks like some activity on your account was misidentified as unauthorized, causing potential charge declines and the cancellation of your account. This was a mistake on our end, so we've gone ahead and re-enabled your account.

There's a lot of mixed messages here that could lead customers, like myself, to freak out. It feels like there should be a different process. If it wasn't for me reaching out in a bunch of places, I would've been lost as a customer.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go take my heart medication.

I'm currently running into this but the shutdown didn't occur until I was preparing for launch this week. I've gotten some success reaching out to them on Twitter but it's been a slow process convincing them that my business does not violate any of their T&C...

Please let me know if you have any other tips on resolving this in a fast manner...

Haha no worries. On 2nd thoughts, I also realize I used a strong word. I should instead say "questioning/blaming" at most.

These get more and more frightening as you go along. You shut down someone's business and you just casually mention you will re-enable them almost as if it is a favor?

I'm sorry you are going through this.

Apparently the answer is create a Hacker News thread, tweet about it, have your Stripe PM friends contact internal support, have your VC friends round up some internal contacts in Stripe, contact old Stripe employees...

...until a real life person from Stripe support finally gives you the time of day.

Really poor process if you ask me.

Why do all major companies act like this? Facebook, Google, PayPal, Stripe...

Is this being taught in some Ivy League module somewhere? I'm genuinely baffled.

I'm sorry for the delays here. I've just sent you an email update. Your Stripe account's all set.

Thank you Edwin. I really appreciate it!

Something similar happened to the company I was working for a few years ago. They suddenly were unable to keep using Stripe for card payments. They implemented something I never knew if it worked out or not (I left the company shortly after):

- they created a “payment promise” flow. Customers were businesses that were paying regularly, so this didn’t change at all, but instead of making a real payment via Stripe, they made a promise of payment at a later point in the future (this promise ended up as a simple Pdf stating the amount to be paid as soon as we could start charging again)

You saved my project from certain death. Thank you

Edwin from stripe - is it too much to ask to have an actual human look at the data and make decisions that concern someones finances and earning situations? What does a ‘100B’ startup even mean if you cant even invest in some decent customer care and outreach… looks like nothing was learned from the Robinhood fiasco.

It doesn’t scale. As soon as you start doing things that don’t scale at scale, costs soar.

I can't share specifics about OP's account, but four humans reviewed the data (i.e. humans hit send on each of the above emails). This is no excuse, though—verifying the legitimacy of a business while protecting customers from fraudsters is something we don't take lightly. This was a rare case in which we were missing some info—but we want future cases to be increasingly rarer. We're reviewing what happened to prevent something similiar from happening again.

Because they can, they pay no price for it That's what happens when you have monopolies and politicians who are supposed to antitrust them are corrupted by them

Amazon is the only big company I know that, at least, seems to care. I had horrible experiences with MercadoLibre and it's payments platform.

Welcome to Platform Capitalism.

I wonder how 3x startup founder got into such a vendor lock, having no backup plan in case when a vendor cancels.

@navd @buf Was Stripe Radar enabled? If I understand right the source of the problem is that a scammer is using a stolen card to make purchase on your platforms?

Interesting, how do you check/respond for such HN posts - do you take in count the upvotes/visibility on the front page, or you just scan "Tell HN: *Stripe*" posts even with zero upvotes?

This is just known as a PO or Purchase Order in business/many regions;

and is also how physical credit card "swipes" (run through a carbon paper copy 'machine') were settled ('back in the day').

Stripe is pretty well known for this behavior at this point. But yea, it sucks. Is the intersection of scammers and legit businesses who message CS frantically protesting that their business is legit really that high? Who cares when your front door UX is good enough and there are podcasts to do?

How many businesses are they having to "shut down without explanation" that it doesn't scale? I understand if this was something like not responding to a wrong charge/refund etc for one customer. But here we are talking about shutting down someone's business without explanation. I do not think "scaling" is the problem here.

Also as someone else mentioned, as much as I love hating on Amazon, customer support is one place where they are absolutely outstanding. I have been able to reach out to their chat support and get issues resolved multiple times (refunds/item returns etc). If Amazon can scale it, then so can these payment processors.

> humans hit send on each of the above emails

Some human might have hit the send button but those emails definitely don't look like they were authored for this specific case as it looks like a generic template email.

Good to see the OP got their issue resolved but I hope someone at stripe implements at least a call back and email reach out before shutting down someone's business in the future. This is a very similar issue with Google where they shut down entire developer accounts without explanation and developers have to create enough shit storm from social media and tech blog posts to get a human to reach out. Droidscript being the most recent well known case:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26956077

They might not be paying a big price today, but they do pay a price - their reputation is damaged and when other potential customers look at who to use, they give more consideration to alternatives.

Sure, but people can only focus on so much at once. To achieve Amazon levels of customer support at Amazon scale, you need years of sacrificing other things in pursuit of customer service.

See this Jeff Bezos interview from 1999: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GltlJO56S1g

Do you intend on going back and reviewing past accounts that were terminated for the same reason?