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Tell HN: DigitalRiver/MyCommerce stopped paying vendors since July

154 points grujicd | 1 comments | 15 Oct 24 12:40 UTC | HN request time: 0.194s | source

We're a small family company and the $20k MyCommerce owes us is a big deal.

For those who don't know MyCommerce is a platform for selling software online. They're merchant of record, they handle taxes, generate license keys, etc so they're a bit higher level than Stripe or PayPal. We're with them since 2005. Things started going south in August. July payment was due on August 15 but never came. Few days afterwards they sent and email that they're changing contract terms and that payments will now be sent 60 days instead of 15 days after the month. Sadly, I didn't switch to another payment processor immediately that day - accountants were on holiday, we were investigating our options, and we were generally happy for 20 years with them. We switched only in September, where they worsened contract terms even more, introducing monthly fee, hourly fee for support, increased payment thresholds, etc. By the time we switched, MyCommerce already sat on entire revenue from July, August, and half of September. Their support is not helpful.

This is not only about us, it's about myriad other vendors, mostly small ones. Unfortunately, we didn't have online space to share our findings and experiences. I only found today that it was discussed on kvraudio forum, and a bit on LinkedIn. There are many small vendors who are now in a hole for tens of thousands of dollars/euros.

It looks pretty much that MyCommerce / DigitarRiver Gmbh are in financial trouble. There are news of layoffs and new management. It's questionable whether we'll see any of our money and when. But the troubling part is MyCommerce still operates and takes orders. If there are vendors who still only know about what MyCommerce officially told them and wait for delayed payments - please reconsider your position.

https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=612462

https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=614929&start=...

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lorant-barla_mycommerce-digit...

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jonjbar ◴[15 Oct 24 13:22 UTC] No.41848311[source]▶
+1 Exactly what we are experiencing ourselves but we made the mistake to wait till the beginning of October to switch: even if we didn't like the payment term changes, we had no reasons to suspect that we wouldn't receive any moneys at the end of September / beginning of October. They now owe us tens of thousands of dollars. And with the massive exodus, I do not have high hopes to get any of that money at all. We've been with this company since 2001 (previously called Element5 / Share-It!) without any problems. I can't understand or imagine what could have made them believe like this: as of today, they are still processing payments from end users! Hopefully, raising awareness on this issue will give us at least answers...
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grujicd ◴[15 Oct 24 13:49 UTC] No.41848579[source]▶
It's speculated on that audio forum that they took a big hit when Kaspersky sales were banned in the USA, as this was their perhaps biggest customer. Who would thought that such thing would affect many other vendors not related in any way to Kaspersky?

Still, their cut is around 5-10%, depending on how much they dip on the exchange rate. That means they hoarded 10-20x of their usual profits for July, August and September from all the other vendors. I sure hope that they didn't spent all that or moved it to a parent company. But the fact that we're not hearing any official statements suggests otherwise.

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1. davorm ◴[19 Oct 24 21:19 UTC] No.41890856[source]▶
Maybe we should tell all of our customers from July to until we switched, to do refund and to switch to new providers? Will that help?