Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

Nov. 29: I received an email from Stripe that 6 of our accounts were under review and payouts were paused. I filled out the forms asking for more information immediately.

Dec 1: I received another set of emails asking for invoices for 2 transactions for each account for their review. One of the other admins on the account emailed those invoices back to Stripe within about 2 hours of the receipt of the requests. The invoices were sent from another email address alias that wasn’t his Stripe account address, so support asked him to change his official stripe account email address and confirm it then they would authenticate the invoices. He followed their instructions and the invoices were apparently accepted, but there was no confirmation email. Logging into the accounts there was a message that the accounts were under review, but no more information was needed from us at the time.

Dec 16: After no communication for 2 weeks on our reviews, I reached out to stripe via Chat. Spending over an hour on chat explaining the issue. Stripe support asked for the same 2 invoices for each account that were send previously. I uploaded them all into the upload link provided by stripe support. After over an hour the chat was moved to email.

Dec 20: Received an email from Stripe support in response to the 12/16 chat thread that they have reviewed my account and had released payouts. I logged into Stripe expecting all 6 accounts to be released, but found that it was only released for 1 account. In response I asked for information on why we were flagged and got no real answer.

Dec 21: Asked for update on other 5 accounts status. I was told that they were still under review.

Dec 24: Received another email in the same 12/16 chat thread that we had payouts re-enabled. I logged into Stripe and found 1 more account was re-enabled. No indication in the email which account they were communicating about.

Dec 27: I had Stripe support call me and I spent close to 2 hours on the phone with them. It seemed like we were starting all over again. All he could say is that the accounts were under review and he reached out to the team reviewing my accounts and hadn’t heard back yet. Then he asked me to upload the same invoices for the affected accounts a 3rd time. No resolution at the end of the call.

Dec 27: I was getting desperate because Stripe support wasn’t giving me any good information and it didn’t seem like things were moving forward quickly. So I tweeted to Stripe about the issue and they asked to DM them. I did, and they gave me a generic response about looking into the issue. No resolution or further contact that day.

Dec 30: After no resolution I decided to try other social media platforms. I posted on Reddit on r/Stripe about the issue. I was asked to email Stripe at heretohelp@stripe.com. I did, but never received a response from that email. I also emailed Patrick@stripe.com since someone on r/Stripe told me to try that (No response).

Dec 30: I also decided to post on HN about the issue. I knew from past Stripe stories that Patrick and Edwin frequented HN, so I figured it couldn’t hurt. This is what eventually solved the issue. @dang asked me to email him and he would send some info on to people at Stripe that he knew and maybe someone would be able to help. Not long after emailing someone from Stripe commented asking me to email them. I did and he was able to expedite my review.

Dec 30: While I was writing my HN post I was also on chat with Stripe for over an hour. No new information. They were basically trying to shut down the chat with me until I sent them the HN story and showed that it was getting some traction. Then they started working on my issue again and trying to communicate with more people. No resolution.

Dec 31: Stripe employee from the HN post emailed and told me that they completed the review of my accounts and re-enabled payouts on the remaining 4 accounts. I was also finally able to get some information from Stripe that most likely the spike of sales on Cyber Monday is what started the review process.

Jan 3: I have confirmed that all of my accounts are now receiving payouts again.

Just as HN is great for showing up stuff and building brand awareness, the opposite is true as well; for me, at least, every time I see issues like this it erodes my perception of Stripe and makes me a bit averse of using their services.

I'm not suggesting there are no alternatives to Stripe, but I am suggesting I'd be doubtful to think that there are other companies that don't also have painful customer service snafus.

It has been a few years though since we sold the company. Super easy to set up, super reliable. Never had any issues w/ them.

I had a relatively minor issue with a paid battle pass in Paladins, a F2P game by Hi-Rez. After they had stonewalled me for over a month, until the battle pass itself ran out, I tried to stir up a shitstorm on like 5 relevant subreddits. My post failed to really take root on most of them, but it got to frontpage of the Nintendo Switch sub. My issue got resolved within a couple of hours.

I wonder if they hit some unspoken of limit whereby they had to provide extra diligence to a bank/creditor to justify the large movement of funds? Or if something about you having 6 seperate accounts had something to do with it. The inability to get a timely resolution likely had something to do with the review team having decreased availibility during the holidays (remember, they probably work hard and have families too, and may have been on vacation or operating at a significantly lower throughput).

I can confirm most places do a horrible job at maintaining customer relationship history, and actually making it readily available to customer service. Furthermore, customer service tends to be just a dispatch point, after an async message is sent, it tends to be the norm that they by default will ask if there's anything else they can do, and if not, on to the next caller/customer.

I've started to push more places toward engaging in synchronous issue resolution for high value issues, as it gets a lot more awkward and has a bigger organizational blast radius when process is so dysfunctional someone external to the organization has to excavate in house communication channels to get an issue resolved.

Far too many places have abandoned customer service/Quality Assurance as high priority operational mandates. The success metric as of late is number of customers who haven't been pissed off enough to leave, thus are still profittable due to willingness to accept our cheapo subpar offering. Not actually happy customers.

If I worked there, y'all woulda been a case study for my group, if it's any comfort.

And they're probably making a nearly conscious decision that a HN thread like this every now and then is acceptable amounts of bad PR. They'll probably do this to someone else again next year.

It would be nice if "doing a good job" was a core competency of what management culture in the US strived for, but that just isn't the actual game. It is all about maximizing profit for this quarter/year.

As soon as I read your comment I went there, I clicked on "I'd like to speak with someone" on their chat popup and have been waiting for that all morning, i.e. they don't seem to care much.