Stripe banned us for payment disputes but we never had a single dispute

As someone with a pre-launch SaaS who just signed up for Stripe, reading this has me shook up a little bit. I'm Stripe-integrated for payments, and poised to go through Stripe Atlas soon, or at least I was.. Now I have no idea what to do. I know that OP's story isn't spotless, but what if it's my thing that gets in this situation too?

I wish I could say I'm joking but I don't need this right now, I'm ~90 days out from launch, I should be tweaking final touches, not building just-in-case backup integrations with other processors.

Comment from tyingq:

> I have a hunch their main concern is this kind of marketing on your site: „Access the American market Our credit card comes with a U.S. billing address, so you can unlock features restricted to the U.S or Western markets especially if you don't live there."

https://justuseapp.com/free-trial-card

Like another commenter said, think about your payment processor like another thing which needs redundancy. Have another one prepared - braintree or whatever.

I saw this, and even though my thing is nowhere near what OP is doing, the amount of what-ifs going through my mind right now is causing undue concern. My SaaS is a podcast host, what if someone I'm hosting says something "wrong" in their show description and Stripe's algo doesn't like it?

Edit: There's a lot on my mind right now, editing to stop for a moment and say thank you, your comment is somewhat reassuring which is what I think your intention was.

That's my initial assumption. I'm curious if this is common behavior to have two integrations, or if it is prohibited by the TOS.

Very common. Mistakes happen, resolution can be slow.

You might be able to justify a single payment gateway integration if you're MVP in a simple consumer retail business.

If being unable to take orders for two weeks would be a big problem, then make sure you have at least two gateways, and keep them all warm.

Proceed with launch as planned and validate your market first of all.

After you have validation of customer buy-in and market acceptance, when you have time and/or funds to spend on your Stripe-alternative feature sprint, setup and integrate a 2nd payment gateway for redundancy.

(as per the commenter above whose biz was banned from Stripe for 7 days by the imperfect non-recourse ban-bot)

Maybe even choose a different gateway that is more cost effective per transaction for a subset of your global customers, and code your system to route customers payments to the preferentially lower-priced gateway for their country.

Then if one gateway bans you, it's not a showstopper and your business is not severely damaged.

Yes, this is a very common practice especially for larger sites. There are even services like Rebilly and Spreedly that simplify this process.

I'm really sorry that this has caused you concern—if you'd like to chat more before launch, please email me at edwin@stripe.com.

>code your system to route customers payments to the preferentially lower-priced gateway for their country.

This is pretty clever, thanks!

Thank you! I didn't know these services even existed, but it makes sense

Use a middleware like Chargebee. Your subscriptions will be saved and there will be no change in UX when you are forced to change the underlying payment processor. Even before launch (assuming you’re a US business) you can have a backup in form of PayPal Payflow Pro, which integrates fine with chargebee.

We got rejected by braintree, and went on a multiple month long back-and-forth and in the end it got nowhere.

Fixed it by using Fastspring. It is a fully integrated solution, with a slightly higher fee, but saves you a lot of dev hours. Their support is amazing.

Edit: it might sound clunky, but asking for wire transfers costs almost 0 dev hours, but can still used to prove your potential clients would really pay.

Think about it from their point of view. Stripe's algo isn't going to go into your platform and investigate podcast guests political opinions - that's some AGI level-5 self-driving car stuff if their automated flagging system could do that. No, their algo is gonna look at the credit cards your system is sending them, how much and how frequently you're charging them, and how much that looks like you're doing bad things (like stealing money from people). From your very limited description, you're totally in the clear.

You're the customer, but you're a business customer, not a consumer customer. B2C vs B2B is different, and the contracts involved are different, and it's different way of thinking. The Internet I have at my house prohibits reselling because I'm buying it as a consumer. If I'm buying a business Comcast account, there's an expectation by Comcast that I'm going to be reselling the Internet access (like if I own a coffee shop or something). Thus, imo it's not common, but it's also not prohibited. (But I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.)

As for having two integrations, what's your opportunity cost? You'll want a backup integration, but imo that's in the same category as having a backup cloud to run on in case AWS goes down. Which, you do, but the time spent working on that is time spent not working on the product.