3 weeks ago, I woke up to a pissed off customer telling me her payments were broken. My startup uses Stripe Connect to accept payments on behalf of our clients, and when I looked into it, I found that Stripe had decided to deactivate her account. Reason listed: 'Other'.
Great.
I contact Stripe via chat, and I learn nothing. Frontline support says "we'll look into it." Days go by, still nothing. Meanwhile, this customer is losing a massive amount of business and suffering.
After a few days, my team and I go at them from as many angles as possible. We're on the phone, we're on Twitter, we're reaching out to connections who work there / used to work there, and of course, we reach out to patio11. All of these support channels give us nothing except "we've got a team looking into it". But Stripe's frontline seems to be prohibited from offering any other info, I assume for liability reasons. "We wouldn't want to accidentally tell you the reason this happened, and have it be a bad one."
We ask: 1. Why was this account flagged? "I don't have that information" 2. What can we do to get this fixed? "I don't have access to that information. 3. Who does? "I don't have access to that information" 4. What can you do about this? "I've escalated your case. It's being reviewed."
I should mention at this point that I've been running this business since 2016, my customers have been more or less the same since then, and I've had (back when it was apparently possible) several phone conversations with Stripe staff about my business model. They know exactly who our customers are and what services we offer, and have approved it as such.
After a week of templated email responses and endless anxiety, we finally got an email from Stripe letting us know that they had reviewed the account and reactivated it. We never got a reason for why any of this had happened, despite asking for one multiple times. Oh well, still good news right? Except nope, this was only the beginning.
This morning I woke up to an email that about 35% of my client accounts had been deactivated and were "Under review", the kicker here being that one of those accounts is the same one they already reviewed last week! This is either the work of incompetent staff or (more likely) a bad algorithm. No reasonable human could make this mistake after last week's drama.
So currently, my product doesn't work for 35% of my customers. Cue torrent of pissed off customer emails.
And the best part is, this time I have an email from Stripe this time: Apparently these accounts are being flagged, despite the notes on our file, and despite the review completed literally last week, as not in compliance with Stripe's ToS. They suggest that if I believe this was done in error, I should reach out to customer support. Oh, you mean the same customer support that can't give me literally any information at all other than "We have a team looking into it"? The same customer support that won't give me any estimates as to how long it's going to take to put this fire out? The same customer support that literally looked into this a week ago and found no issues!?
I feel like I'm going crazy over here. These accounts have hundreds of thousands of dollars in them being held hostage by an utterly incompetent team / algorithm that seems to lack any and all empathy for the havoc they wreak on businesses when they pull the rug out from under them with no warning, nor for the impact they have on customers when they all of a sudden lose all ability to make money. And all that for an account that has been using Stripe for nearly 7 years without issue!
This goes so far beyond "customer support declining at scale." If lack of customer support means that critical integrations start to fail, that's not a customer support failure, that's a fundamental business failure.
All the while the rest of us know absolutely nothing about what just happened!
What exactly is going on? What is the business model? And why does it require that these cases reach Hacker News before they are solved by @edwinwee!?
1. Tomorrow we're regrouping with the team to see how we can improve our processes to prevent a similar case from happening again.
2. We're working on a new version of the Stripe Connect dashboard right now. There will be much more detail on which connected accounts are restricted and how to resolve the issues. We want to release it soon and I think it’ll provide platforms better visibility into the state of their accounts.
It is obviously of interest to many in the community if services they might use or consider using themselves are having problems or letting their customers down. I personally have no problem with leveraging the publicity that social media affords to get a problem resolved if those services haven't got their act together within a reasonable amount of time.
However there is a serious risk of unfair or just plain incorrect reporting when one side gets to set the agenda and the other side either can't respond for legal/regulatory reasons or has their response buried among the other comments. People can be far too quick to reach for the pitchforks in these discussions before knowing all the facts and on sites with voting mechanics there is a danger of mob mentality distorting the subsequent discussion as well.
In this case it looks like Stripe probably did handle some aspects of this situation poorly (bad and people deserve to know it can happen) but are probably also taking steps to avoid screwing up the same way in future (good and people deserve to know that too). Then everyone can form their own opinions and discuss the issues but at least starting from a relatively balanced and well-informed position.
Now we're asking that to stay true to that part of the company. Not because we want to see them fail but because we want to see them succeed.