This is not ranting, it's a genuine question, I'm seeing too many people complaining about stripe effectively stealing their business money or holding it hostage for unresonable excuses, it seems to me like using stripe now is like gambling with your business.
As far as I know, Stripe services is not unique and dozens of alternatives exist out there, so I wonder what makes it a valid option with all the risk it brings to businesses, it would make more sense to me if Stripe is bankrupt by now.
I know there is probably a good answer to my question but I can't really find it.
Many complaints posted about Stripe on HN, Twitter, and Reddit are from fraudulent users looking to overturn decisions we've correctly made. They look to turn outrage into action in an attempt to defraud customers of money. We have to take action to protect Stripe, Stripe users, and Stripe users' customers. We don't and won’t comment on specific cases for privacy reasons.
It's important to know that almost every case posted here since summer has ended with confirmation that the activity was fraudulent.
We can make mistakes and those can be acutely painful to legitimate users. But those are few and far between.
Coinbase also has a lot of this type of stuff and I've long suspected the same. It's people doing shady stuff and trying anything they can think of to get their shady money, which Coinbase has frozen.
As for part of the OP's question: Stripe absolutely has one unique thing. Amazing developer infrastructure. And even a lot of stuff built on top of their infrastructure by others. For example: I'm using Laravel Cashier. It saves me so much time building and I can do all sorts of cool stuff with it. Setting up a merchant account with Chase or whatever, you're not going to get all of that.
That there is your problem, you essentially say "they are wrong, but we won't tell you why so just trust us".
You need to be more transparent or accept the fact that your public image will continue to wither and lose people trust.
Imagine for example that your personal bank account was closed and the moneys held by the bank and you had no recourse other than emailing a general inbox or talking to customer support who can't do anything other than sympathize. Without that bank account you can lose your house, car, and assets. It's a very scary and very real thing. The bank can say that 99% of the time, the accounts are closed due to fraud, but you're that poor 1% (according to the bank) and therefore you're just a casualty of the process. There are harms from crooks and fraudsters, but there are harms to the individuals too.
The main issue is not that Stripe is working hard to protect itself and its customers, but the merchants feel very powerless in these situations. When it takes a massive effort to get attention, especially if you're small and powerless, you feel that you have no control, and that your issues (which might not be fraudulent) will go unanswered. What can the average, powerless merchant who doesn't have the weight of social media, HN, @dang, or others on their side do when their hard-earned money is being held, locked, or otherwise prevented, and when the cause is not fraudulent, or if the merchant is unaware of that activity? The problem is that accounts are just shut down, moneys are held, and there's no quick or clear communication, with customer support simply saying it's not in their control. It's this feeling of powerlessness that's the issue, regardless of whether or not Stripe is in its rights or doing what it feels is in its and its customers best interests.
What can you do to help empower the powerless merchants when their livelihoods are at stake? Can you provide some way to not instantly assume fraud or malicious intent on behalf of the merchant and provide some quick and direct way for the merchant to feel empowered?
If someone is ramping up a new business, say a subscription business that will go from $0 in January to over $1M in just a few months, that would easily trigger a fraud system, but it's not fraudulent, it's just a business that's seeing success. How can the merchant work with Stripe in advance to provide signals that there's something legit happening?
To your specific point around not assuming malicious intent/empowering users to take action, we're revamping the ways that we ask users for more information about their businesses. And we’ve set a higher bar for the speed to resolve these issues. In the majority of cases, we want to allow users to continue operating during this time. In the specific example of a fast growing subscription business, they would continue to operate without issue, while providing documentation to Stripe to support their growth (if they had triggered any of our fraud detection systems).
In the last three months, we’ve also reduced the rate that users contact support with Risk-related questions by 45%. So, we're encouraged by our progress but there is still lots of work to do.
Can you give examples to support this bold assertion?
Read the whole comment before responding, please.
> We can make mistakes and those can be acutely painful to legitimate users.
Any lessons that can be learned and shared here? What things can legitimate users avoid doing, so they don't wind up as false positives for fraud?
I'd much rather live in a world where I can read blunt comments by developers, versus a watered-down statements written by PR firms to absolutely avoid rubbing anyone the wrong way.
How many is "too many"?
You probably only see a few people/companies complaining, not the thousands (millions?) of users that are entirely happy with Stripe. Look up "minority influence," "outlier influence," and "vocal minority effect."
Also, as @eerikkivistik points out; it's just easier to get something up and running with Stripe and similar "out of the box" solutions. If your product is profitable after some time, and you are still unsure about using Stripe, spend money on switching to something that is more comfortable for you.
As you yourself point out:
> As far as I know, Stripe services is not unique [...]
Feel free to use others instead. No one is forcing to use Stripe, I hope?
[^] concerns at least these countries as well as all EU countries. possibly a lot more if you breach the minimum-thresholds: AE, AL, AO, BH, BY, CL, CO, CR, DZ, EC, IN, KE, KR, MD, MX, RS, RU, SA, UG, VN, CH, TJ, GE
You’re not hearing from all the happy customers and you’re possibly getting info from sites that heavily bias towards high tech and strong, loud opinions.
And in many cases, you might not have an issue now. But you learn how the company could treat you when there's a problem, and that's something worth learning.
Bad communication + holding all money for long time, is not fraud prevention, it is a horrible service, and this has been mentioned by dozens of business owners so far and is not a specific case.
We've built around some of the limitations and expanded it to be super powerful (e.g., we built a cashback system based around Stripe's excellent webhooks https://arnon.dk/how-we-built-a-cashback-system-with-stripe/)
I don't need it for the stuff that "would keep money hostage" as others say so I haven't experienced it at all.
I think the people whose money was kept hostage would say the same. That is until their money got held hostage.
because Paddle is even worse, they nearly killed our business out of ill-will, stupidity and incompetence.
so far Stripe works a lot better.
one thing that seems essential is having (at least) two payment providers working, so if one is trying to wipe you out, you can just flip a switch and have a working backup. we use FastSpring for all countries that require VAT being remitted, and could extend this to all other countries to prevent any service disruption.
Most credible merchants would do better with a bank or similar processor, assuming they have some experience in programming interfaces (or at least troubleshooting them).
I imagine it was because I hadn't used it in several years, but I will never know because part of the termination notice stated that there would be no way to reinstate it, dispute the account closure, or talk to anyone about it.
That money was essentially stolen by PayPal and I'll never see it again.
Fraud is fraud. It affects everybody, not just the person whos card was stolen.
Feel free to list them.
I’m not saying any of these have 1:1 offerings or are necessarily better or worse, but I think most people first look to Stripe for card payment processing and those are other options you might consider.
Unlike what the HN echo chamber will tell you, the answer is to use multiple payment gateways rather than go all in on one. It makes zero sense to be stuck on to one payment gateway.
or
“why do things not scale how i want them to”
sounds like a skill issue
