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

501 points eeemmmooo | 2 comments | 03 Jan 23 15:52 UTC | HN request time: 1.622s | source

This is an update to my previous post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34189717 . Stripe has resolved the issue and everything has been released. I told the contacts at Stripe that I would do a write up about what happened from my point of view to help them understand what happened to me. I figured it would be good to do that write up publicly to help both Stripe and potential Stripe customers understand what happened and how it was resolved.

Summary: Stripe put my accounts in review for a spike in sales on Cyber Monday. Throughout the month we received very little communication from Stripe and had many support chats and calls. Keep in mind that the whole time Stripe was still accepting payments on our behalf on all of these accounts. Each of the chats/calls asked us to upload the same invoices each time for review and gave us vague information that our accounts were being reviewed. Finally out of frustration I posted on HN about my issue. Thanks to @dang for getting a Stripe employee to respond and he was finally able to resolve the issue for me.

Overall this review process was pretty bad. Very little communication and nothing I could really do directly to move things along or get any real information. It took a random Stripe employee to get an email from @dang and post on HN in order to get this issue resolved. I’m lucky because I know about HN and know that Stripe employees frequent the site, but I don’t think HN wants to become the Stripe support forum.

Stripe you can do better. We all know that in order to scale you need to automate pieces of your infrastructure and communication. But, there is a balance between automation and manual review. When someone like me gets caught up in an automated system there needs to be better ways of letting support help that person.

See my comments below for actual details and dates.

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cj ◴[03 Jan 23 16:41 UTC] No.34233819[source]▶
This reminds me of an issue my sister is having with Etsy.

She runs an Etsy store with $1-2 million in annual sales, and her store keeps getting taken down by Etsy's automated copyright infringement system -- which keeps getting triggered by someone submitting fraudulent copyright claims and then immediately asking her to pay $5k/month in exchange for the person to stop submitting the infringement claims (in other words, she's being extorted).

Basically Etsy immediately takes down listings with no human review upon receiving a copyright complaint, which can be used by black hat scammers to extort stores into paying $5k-10k/month in exchange for the black hat to stop submitting fraudulent claims.

It's really astounding that companies build these automated systems that hurt their customers with no humans on standby to resolve these kind of edge cases (false positives).

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bread90 ◴[03 Jan 23 17:21 UTC] No.34234465[source]▶
What does she sell on her store?
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cj ◴[03 Jan 23 17:29 UTC] No.34234621[source]▶
Laser cut wooden signs. She has a big warehouse in florida with commercial grade laser cutting machines (they started on a Glowforge!)

The products are all custom, e.g. your family's last name laser cut onto wood.

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1. redeux ◴[03 Jan 23 19:16 UTC] No.34236498[source]▶
I’d love some info on how she grew to that size on Etsy. My partner sells some things on Etsy and has had moderate success but nowhere on that level. Did she use Etsy ads, off platform marketing, or some kind of listing optimization for Etsy search to drive that kind of growth?
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2. cj ◴[03 Jan 23 19:50 UTC] No.34237001[source]▶
From my understanding it's mostly organic, ranking well in Etsy search. I think she does paid ads to boost + supplement, but organic Etsy search is the primary growth channel. Which is also difficult and frustrating because you basically have to get really good at guessing what Etsy's algorithms are, which they change frequently (in other words, SEO but for Etsy). I don't think there's a magic bullet. A lot of trial and error