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Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

1624 points yaythefuture | 2 comments | 15 Sep 22 16:33 UTC | HN request time: 0.439s | source

Saw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32261868 from a couple weeks ago and figured I'd share my own story.

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.

1. graderjs ◴[16 Sep 22 01:00 UTC] No.32860648[source]▶
What sort of business do your run?

I'm considering using stripe connect for something very tame (like a gig economy thing) and I've looked into it and I really want to use standard accounts because I don't like how the liability shifts to me for custom and Express accounts.

Sure, the customized user experience for those is quite nice but I don't really care about that I just want to ensure I can have the best possible relationship with a payment processor.

Honestly I love stripe like how they made s** easy for me. I had my first case of fraud the other day and it's just so easy to refund it and all the tools they provide I just feel so safe like they protected me from whatever bad s** could have happened if I hadn't you know handled this potential fraud well.

Personally I found their email support to be really comprehensive and just really top-notch awesome and their chat support to be more responsive and more generalized but still good. So my suggestion is like maybe if you have a serious issue maybe email support is a good way to go I mean just an idea.

The thing about standard accounts for connect is all of that interaction on the client's account gets deactivated or something you're not responsible for trying to pick that up like that's between the customer and strive so I mean maybe it's not a great experience for your customers but for the longevity of your business and for the experience of all your customers you can basically say sorry you know you have to take this up with stripe there's nothing we can do. Maybe I don't have the correct info but that's how I understand it.

The way I see these payment processors though is like my connect business will exist at the benefiance and generosity at the grace of the king. I mean I basically have to you keep the kings of the stripe empire happy because you know my upcoming connect business is completely dependent on them. So I think that's going to be in my thinking like rather than just thinking all I have to do everything to satisfy customers my first customer will actually be stripe so I have to do everything to satisfy them and then I have to do everything to satisfy customers. to some people that may not sound ideal but I just see that as the reality.

At the same time in the long term because of how these things can occur like your business got nuked, I've read of other people's businesses getting cancelled... I'm sure there are processes behind it but like I have the feeling of fear like this could just happen to me one day even if I'm trying to do everything right.

Maybe it couldn't but I have that fear and I think I need to take precautions for that so basically I think I have to keep a good relationship with stripe but at the same time I want to develop a way to like have a button that I can switch and, "okay stripe bans me" and I can switch over like technical redundancy to another payment processor.

Even then I don't think is a foolproof strategy because I mean I'm sure all the big payment processes are kind of in League with each other and in communication with each other to some extent so you there may be some you know you'll get sort of banned by a whole clique of them or something but ... like other people have said here it seems there are payment processes who take on business who have been kicked out of stripe.

---

Also no offense but my impression from Reading striped docs is like if they're going to you know be banning connect accounts or you know having issues with payments then you'll get some sort of warnings about like early forward warning or you know you'll get requests for information you know for compliance purposes for those connect accounts I don't know my sense is like maybe you just thought those requests or those notifications or just not important you know you got your business to run you don't have time for this you're sure that all your customers are legitimate you know you feel you can vouch for them and so your attitude was it doesn't f*** matter I don't have to do this. I mean maybe so you're saying their support wasn't responsive but maybe my feeling is you probably might not have been responsive in the past.

That's just my sense but you know I might be incorrect about that and I think it just kind of is reassuring for me to think that's the case because then I can think well I can do better you know I can have a a more assured relationship with them then what I've read about. Anyway that's my take on it you got to try to be prepared but I certainly offer a lot of good stuff.

replies(1): >>32862141 #
2. graderjs ◴[16 Sep 22 04:38 UTC] No.32862141[source]▶
Ugh... why is Google's voice typing so not good.

1) It doesn't seem to learn.

2) I think it was better a couple years ago.

3) The transcription seems very slow. But I remember a couple years ago it was lightning fast.

Any settings or premium version that can be signed up for?