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501 points eeemmmooo | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.375s | 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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eole666 ◴[] No.34233383[source]
Stripe seems really expensive with poor support... Apparently they take more than 1.4% of your earning. For $400K, it's more than 11 200$. With that money you could hire a developer for a month or two and make him/her create a payment platform adapted to your needs and under your control.
replies(1): >>34233505 #
haliskerbas ◴[] No.34233505[source]
I'm not sure who would be willing to build a PCI, AML, KYC, compliant payment service that can accept credit and debit cards from most countries, for $11k USD.
replies(1): >>34234170 #
eole666 ◴[] No.34234170[source]
Well you're right, if you create it from scratch. I was rather thinking about creating a simple payment handling module centralizing your bank's own pro platform and other things like paypal, apple pay ... etc
replies(1): >>34235010 #
cdeangel ◴[] No.34235010[source]
Most of those processing fees get paid out to the card issuer. Square has a good breakdown here: https://squareup.com/payments/our-fees

You're not getting away from those fees, no matter what backend system you're using to process cards. How do you think credit cards make money on those reward programs?

replies(2): >>34235317 #>>34236656 #
1. eole666 ◴[] No.34236656[source]
Yep, but at least you get payment on your bank account directly.. And for Apple pay, PayPal or things like that I imagine if it's done using stripe on top of that, fees of each platform add up with stripe fees ? Or maybe not ?