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1624 points yaythefuture | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.206s | 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.

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cx42net ◴[] No.32863188[source]
The discussion here is very interesting. Many mentions the idea to not put all your eggs in the same (Stripe) basket. I agree with it, but how?

You can not just store the credit card of your user (or have to go through a heavy compliance), and using services like Killbill.io or GetLago.com is just moving the single point of failure to another place.

How would you ensure that you are not 100% relying on a specific payment provider, without keeping all the credit card informations of your users?

replies(1): >>32863243 #
pamonrails ◴[] No.32863243[source]
Kill Bill (note: I'm a co-founder) provides payment routing capabilities, so you can integrate with multiple providers (e.g. Stripe + Adyen) and shift payment traffic to go through one or the other dynamically. This is very common in large b2c companies.

That being said, to your point, this still requires either a vendor neutral vault for the cards or to tokenize them in all of the vendors. Possible, but still hard to do in practice.

replies(1): >>32863795 #
1. cx42net ◴[] No.32863795[source]
Yeah,that's what I think too : It seems hard (impossible) to register user's credit card at each payment provider (Stripe, Adyen, etc) and then start a subscription at some place (Stripe) and automatically switch in case of issues. There is high probability that in this scenario, Adyen will see the credit card refused because it never did a single payment for, say, 2 years, and suddenly starts a 300$ monthly subscription.

And I'm not even talking about 3D Secure!

As mentioned in the comments, a solution would be to migrate from Stripe to a merchant account with a bank where your service is vetted upfront.