
How Braintree destroyed a successful taxi startup from Serbia - bressian
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10101600372983034&set=a.10101417454413314.1073741827.152300130&type=3
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jimnotgym
We put a new ecommerce site live on Magento2. We were short on time, so to
make everything go _more smoothly_ we chose to move our payments to Braintree
as they have an pre integrated checkout with Magento2. Of all the things I
thought I would be sitting up all night sorting out, I really didn't expect it
to be Braintree, but it was. I'm sorry if this sounds harsh to Americans, but
the fact it was thanksgiving did not interest me in the slightest, as we are
at work that day, and so are our banks. If you want to sell your service in
the UK you should be available 9-5 UK time. Braintree's 11 am opening time,
was the most infuriating thing when I could see customers failing at the
checkout. Other US companies I speak to have operators on from 9am our time,
even if it is 3am over there. We already have a high volume Paypal acocunt,
and I had to call everyone I could to pull strings to get them to answer at
Braintree. Turns out the account I set up with them some weeks before had not
been pushed live, except they told me it had, so we only had the introductory
level of payments.

Their integration with Magento sucks too...Set up all of the anti-fraud tools
and you will barely get a payment to go through...

~~~
sk5t
> I'm sorry if this sounds harsh to Americans, but the fact it was
> thanksgiving did not interest me in the slightest, as we are at work that
> day, and so are our banks. If you want to sell your service in the UK you
> should be available 9-5 UK time

What does Braintree's SLA look like? Are these service levels something a UK
customer ought to expect having enrolled for an account with Braintree?

~~~
skrebbel
How is the SLA relevant? I mean, GP is not blaming Braintree for breach of
contract, they're blaming Braintree for shitty service.

~~~
otoburb
The SLA is 100% relevant. If Braintree had an SLA that stated (hopefully
clearly) that they would only be offering support during US hours then there'd
be little standing to complain from a contractual standpoint.

No doubt this would be a questionable business practice on Braintree's part if
true, but clarity around expectations from each party is pretty fundamental to
the question at hand.

~~~
koolba
Bingo. It's not what you think you're going to get or what you want to get,
it's what they said they're going to give you.

If the SLA says they're available from M-F 9am-5pm NYC time then you're SOL if
you're expecting them to be around on Saturday morning.

EDIT: _For the non-native speakers, SOL = Shit Outta Luck_

------
zitterbewegung
The post rambles for a long time and slings some mud against braintree. Their
claim is that they couldn't do a wire transfer from their merchant account to
their business account. Looking on braintree's website they don't appear to
support Serbia. [https://www.braintreepayments.com/en-si/country-
selection?re...](https://www.braintreepayments.com/en-si/country-
selection?referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F)

~~~
sova
If they are using USD I fail to see how country even plays a role. It makes
sense if you are converting currency, you want to have a local office to keep
some sort of buoyancy. However, if the currency matches your origin, then you
can do digital business anywhere there's an ip address. I fail to see how
country can play a role in what is presumably an entirely USD-based
transaction.

~~~
kolinko
Different regulations regarding money transmitting businesses in different
countries.

Different countries require different paperwork from money transmitters, and
you have tomcomplain with it. If you could just follow your country's red
tape, all the money transmitters would just operate from an unregulated tax
heaven...

~~~
charlesdm
This sounds like the Paypal stories all over again. Oh wait, Paypal acquired
Braintree.

~~~
CCing
Not really...the regulations has always been there.

------
justin66
As they're a subsidiary of PayPal, it really would require extraordinary
evidence to convince me that Braintree doesn't suck. Sadly, no such evidence
was offered in the linked post.

~~~
intrasight
>a subsidiary of PayPal

And for that reason, I direct my clients to go elsewhere.

~~~
lai
What other payment processor would you suggest?

~~~
L_226
Stripe

~~~
thepoet
Stripe can ask you to shutdown a legitimate product if they get bullied from
some other larger organisation. It happened with us and we lost the respect we
had for Stripe.

~~~
Hengjie
Can you explain your situation a bit more?

------
foxylad
I think developers come at payment services with a mindset that it's such a
simple thing (it's really just decrementing a number in one account and
incrementing a number in another account) that they leave it to last to
implement. Like security, it should be part of every decision you make, from
day one. Particularly if you live outside the US.

CarGo's experience is a great example. For an app that lives and dies on
efficient payment processing, they would have had been wise to have two
payment processors coded up and ready to go. They should have been completely
honest with their payment processors, built up a relationship, and sought
assurances that their operation was acceptable.

The payment processor's biggest problem by far is fraud. That is why they have
to charge significant margins, and why you have to send all your great-
grandparent's birth certificates to them, and why they will suspend your
account if there is the faintest whiff of suspicion. That's what makes the
decrement-increment hard - really hard.

Treat the payments problem with the respect it deserves - as CarGo has found
out, it can kill your business dead overnight.

~~~
everydaypanos
The first thing they ask you when you open an account is how much volume you
have.. There is no such thing as a "backup" payment gateway.

The first few weeks of operation the "backup" gateway would suspend your
account for not providing the necessary volume of sales.

~~~
flurdy
True, you can't call them "backup" to their face. But you will trickle through
traffic for weeks whilst you sort out teething troubles anyway, so there is
not going to be volumes after a few weeks.

Then eventually you can make a decision which works best. The new provider
(the backup) or the old provider. Then turn the volume to the best one.

Though I would never go 100% on any of them. Maybe keep some geoip through the
backup. E.g. South America with one provider. France with another. Or a 5%
load balanced volume.

It is good to keep them all up to date and active, as from experience they all
frequently f-up and you have to feature toggle a provider off for a day or
week now and then, or at least throttle them down.

~~~
everydaypanos
It is not a matter of just being shut down due to low volume. The rates that
you get depend on the volume. So the "back up" gateways end up so expensive
you have no interest in even keeping them around.

From my experience you end up being tied pretty hard to pretty one provider
and as long as you make fraud prevention yourself you can stay in business.
Problem is that if you do all the fraud prevention stuff yourself then why do
you need braintree for? To just invoke a .charge(100, "EUR")??

~~~
cookiecaper
>It is not a matter of just being shut down due to low volume. The rates that
you get depend on the volume. So the "back up" gateways end up so expensive
you have no interest in even keeping them around.

The rate difference would be an investment in redundancy. If Provider A goes
down, I would guess you'll be grateful to have Provider B taking the failover
traffic, even if costs you an extra 2.9% in transaction costs. You'd keep
feeding Provider B the minimally-acceptable amount of traffic at the higher
price point to keep that redundancy alive.

------
flurdy
Braintree is now a subsidiary of Paypal which makes me slightly suspicious of
them from past Paypal experiences. Though up till now I had only heard good
things about Braintree.

Without more exact details it is hard to cast an objective judgment, for me at
least. Though the dude seems pretty pissed.

------
everydaypanos
In a world where Stripe is used in very few countries - Braintree seemed like
a great alternative(It was just about the time it was being bought by PayPal).

Six months into our "cooperation" they sent an email breaking the contract
with us(e-commerce retailer) because their "bank" was protesting too many of
our sales..

The truth of the matter is that Braintree was literally accepting all credit
card transactions and had almost 0 fraud protection(for example we had orders
being shipped to a Greek city, ordered by Iraqi-named citizens using US based
credit cards..they all went through fine).

So they just breached the cooperation and they kept a large chunk of the owed
money for like 4 months until their "bank" verified some thing or the other.

In my personal experience you cannot rely on Braintree to block fraudulent
transactions for you - you have to do it yourself and _pray_ that still you
don't miss on too many frauds passing through to Braintree. Makes you wonder
what use all these "credit card gateways" have if you still have to bear all
the cost of doing the fraud-prevention yourself..

~~~
URSpider94
That is true for almost all payment gateways - fraud protection is the
responsibility of the client. Read up on what happened to Stripe customers in
the hover board craze of 2015-16. That's why there are many popular third-
party fraud reduction services (for a fee, of course).

------
whalesalad
Sounds like you need to stop complaining and pick a new payment provider. Get
a local loan, start giving away free rides, continue to pay your drivers and
start a countdown clock to doomsday. That's how long you have to implement a
new solution and recover from this.

Or you can whine about it on Facebook and a few weeks from now you'll be
forgotten.

~~~
iaintnohacker
Easier said than done...I already borrowed bunch of cash to keep the wheels
spinnin...cant get a loan, as we got no physical assets, so doomsday came and
I bitch about it. Still, it is unfair what they are doing to us, I am sure we
are not the only ones too...

~~~
taBelgrado
Have you considered getting a loan from a P2P lending network? I heard good
things about mintos.com, check them out or google for alternatives.

------
no_wizard
After reading the comments, and seeing what others have gone through, and
generally speaking I'm not the biggest fan of PayPal. I gotta say: +1 to
stripe! [https://stripe.com/](https://stripe.com/)

They are fantastic to work with, and its super easy to get setup with them.
Hats off!

~~~
averagewall
I asked Stripe a question once, and they answered! Specifically and referring
to the details I had described in my question. I'd never expect that from a
Paypal. But like Braintree, that will probably become a thing of the past as
they grow bigger.

~~~
fxbois
I've always received (very) high quality responses from Stripe support in the
next 12h. It's a great company. Concerning Braintree, the fact that they do
not provide REST like API and only SDK is a no go.

------
retreatguru
It's hard to gather from this post what exactly happened. Does anyone have
details?

~~~
stephentmcm
All I got form that was "we cloned Uber, then didn't do due process when
selecting a payment gateway".

~~~
bukka
Yes, the only reason this app exists is because Uber isn't allowed to run in
Serbia.

~~~
FireBeyond
Which isn't exactly germane to the issue at hand. Cloning someone else's
business idea has no bearing on 'should they be able to earn money for
services provided?'.

------
ManuAloha
We actually had the exact same situation here in Hong Kong with Braintree.
They did not transfer the funds to our account and always blamed "banking
partners" for the problems. The worst customer service I've dealt with and
switching to Stripe as soon as it became available in Hong Kong was a no
brainer.

~~~
spraak
Given you're in HK, interesting username (ManuAloha). Are you from HI? In any
case, aloha from Kaua'i :)

~~~
ManuAloha
Aloha! Not from Hawaii but would be happy to move there once day :D

------
wav-part
Payment Processing/Network is the most innovation-less thing IMO. But still
there is not a non-profit leader. Why ?

~~~
th0raway
On both parts of your comment you are missing a huge piece of the puzzle:
fraud.

A payments processor (old school or digital) is constantly taking on some
certain amount of risk of fraud, from both the credit card user and the
merchant itself. I could set up a store that appears to be real and just move
my money out of my bank account and run. I could also go to a carding site,
use real credit cards on my own fake store, wait for my transfers to process,
cash out of my store and run. I could 'just' use it as a small operation to
check whether my stolen credit cards are really working, and then make big
purchases later... and that's just the very basics in merchant fraud.

Between this fraud, and risks from otherwise honest parties (what do you think
happens when people preorder something, the company goes under, and the
consumer tells the CC company that they want their money back? Someone ends up
holding the bag), it'd be pretty much impossible to run a payment processor as
a non profit center without a lot of work. Add to that that merchants want
more complex features, like subscriptions, the effort to maintain PCI
compliance, and that adding support for each new payment type and country is a
pain in the behind for everyone, even for companies that do their very best to
cut out every middleman.

So as long as you are interacting with banks and the risk of fraud is not
carried 100% by the consumer, bitcoin style, you'll have a lot more innovation
than you think, most of it dedicated to making life harder for fraudsters, and
you'll find that this is something that you have to do for-profit. I'd not
even consider doing it without venture capital, because you need a bankroll to
handle the fraud losses which will definitely happen.

If you want proof of the innovation going on, just ask any fraud forum out
there: There were plenty of people with nice and easy ways to defraud online
processors, but nowadays, for all but the best fraudsters, it's a whole lot of
effort for very little compensation.

And still, I'd not be caught dead carrying the amount of risk that someone
like Braintree or Stripe is carrying on a regular basis without a profit
motive.

~~~
wav-part
I was more thinking about non-profit's own payment network over cc & others.

Fraud can be solved by making each irreversible txn ratable. Each seller can
choose to make sum of all ratings and txn over some period public to appear
more trustworthy. The algo can be more tweaked but txn rating is the gist.

------
sandra65
I was just going through some blog online when I met a testimony of this BLANK
ATM CARD made by H.A.C TECH (rameeshj.86@gmail.com) I contacted that very
address and I got one at an imaginable rate.(compared to what the card
carries,the rate is minimal) At first I thought,it was gonna be some scam or
something. But when I got the card I could get nothing less that $10,000 in a
day. (ten thousand usd). Here is the testimony I saw; “Its the programmed ATM
card that can hack into all ATM machines. Its works with any currency and in
any country where you might be living. Its is programmed in a way that when
transaction is carried out with the card ,it can’t be traced. To make use of
this card ,you need no account number or even pin of anyone. Its simple
because there is a manual attatched that teaches usage ,and also give more
explanation concerning the card.” So friends,its a new year and a new
beginning. If you need funds to start up some busines,pay up bills and loans
or money to live a good life? Then you gat to make this opportunity yours.
Though is illegal as you and I know ,but since government can’t satisfy my
whole needs, I have to do what I have to do,to get what I want and for my
family to be happy..Though this post is not for everybody,but for those who
truly need change from a poor state to a wealthy life. A way to say happy new
year to you and you out there. address once more is rameeshj.86@gmail.com …….
and you can open the link bellow in youtube to see how this is real working
[https://youtu.be/-z84lTD8nWs](https://youtu.be/-z84lTD8nWs)

------
penetrarthur
I wonder if Stripe could now cover their operational costs in a form of a loan
and process payments from now on. Would be a great PR move.

------
brentm
Unrelated to the payment subject but it always blows my mind when companies
not just copy a business model (which is fine and expected) but also more or
less copy the identity along the way.

~~~
brianwawok
Which identity did they copy? (I mean, I suspect you are implying Uber or
Lyft, but I didn't get any vibes that pointed me towards either one of them
past the "app for taxi" part)

~~~
Buge
[https://i.imgur.com/3pyKkY9.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/3pyKkY9.jpg)

[https://i.imgur.com/A8T3aso.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/A8T3aso.jpg)

They both have the name of the app in the top center, in a thin stylized font,
with lots of spacing between the letters. Immediately under is the words
"Pickup location" in light text on a white background then under that the
address where you are being picked up. There's a blue circle to represent your
location.

There's the map with pastel colors, and a popup with round corners saying "Set
Pickup Location" then on the right side of that is a circle with a right 90
degree angle arrow inside with rounded corner and ends. Under that is a
pushpin with a sphere with a specular highlight. In one corner of the screen
is a man's silhouette inside a circle.

~~~
hobofan
The name and colors actually feel even more blatantly copied from car2go.
([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.car2go&hl=...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.car2go&hl=en))

------
Buge
The comparison to soldiers killing people is pretty ridiculous.

~~~
cwilkes
As well as people in Chicago grilling steaks and going to ball games. In the
winter?

Now if he said something like "eating a lassanga soupy mixture that you call
pizza" I would have been clapping.

~~~
Wh1zz
I'm sorry...winter? It's almost April now, although of course the grilling
steaks is still probably an overstatement

~~~
dkuntz2
I think we got the most snow we've had all winter last week.

------
mdekkers
I have been looking to move away from Braintree for a while, they are
eyewateringly expensive, and are now Paypal, which I am extremely
uncomfortable with. I was previously based in a country where there is no
Stripe support, but that is changing, so looking at alternatives. Can't wait
to move away...

------
bythckr
Car:GO is 100% at fault for relying on a service not present in the same
country for a vital service as payment. Plus a startup like Car:go should pair
up with a start up like itself where they are the main customer.

We need to have multiple options for vital services like payment.

------
kumarski
This happened so often, that I assembled a group of 100+ fintech entrepreneurs
on facebook just to counter situations like this. Urgh. I feel bad for him.

[https://www.facebook.com/groups/1650565665218718/](https://www.facebook.com/groups/1650565665218718/)

I know this is awful, but the general reputation/expectation is that a foreign
company can't handle payments infrastructure in Serbia, I never thought it
would be the backwards version of this.

------
zod50
if using Braintree would lead to problems like the ones mentioned by OP, what
are the alternatives, in US and elsewhere, square cash?

~~~
wheelerwj
Stripe, probably, is going to handle something like this the best. but there
are a TON of "alternatives" out there.

~~~
pm90
Is it very hard to roll an in house solution in collaboration with a local
bank?

~~~
briandear
I was about to say that this 'problem" smells like a potential new startup.

~~~
wheelerwj
payments, in general, are terrible for startups. They are low margin, high
capital cost, extremely regulated, and highly competitive. The incumbents have
zero interest or incentive to work with you, so you have to be very well
connected to get anything done. All of these alone make it a bad idea for a
startup, but combined, they are nothing short of insurmountable for all but
the experienced and well funded founders.

Here is a great piece by Danny Shader, CEO of PayNearMe. They are one of the
most successful payments startups in recent history. You should give it a
read: [http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/17/so-you-want-to-start-a-
pay...](http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/17/so-you-want-to-start-a-payments-
company/)

------
Spoygg
More detailed info on [https://thenextweb.com/insider/2017/03/20/did-
braintree-paym...](https://thenextweb.com/insider/2017/03/20/did-braintree-
payments-just-kill-a-successful-serbian-taxi-startup)

------
whazor
If you are searching for a payment provider, you can also look at Adyen. While
their integrations and API's are a bit rough, they have many payment providers
and important international customers using it.

------
dorianm
Instead of complaining there are many solutions:

\- Let the drivers accept cash in the meantime?

\- Move to another payment processor? (e.g. Stripe?)

\- Accept bitcoin?

\- Use some direct payment between passengers and drivers? (e.g. Venmo,
bitcoin, etc.)

(I messaged him that)

------
albertico
this isn't new, big companies love to screw small ones. They are assholes at
Braintree, that is well known, i recommend the guys at cargo to switch to
Stripe. Those people are enterpreneurs like you..... hope the best for ya
mate!

~~~
icebraining
Stripe doesn't support Serbia.

~~~
Buge
Does Braintree?

~~~
Cenk
Nope

------
nodesocket
This guy get's absolutely zero sympathy from me when he starts his rant,
complaining in a condescending tone.

"It sure is a weekend. It is probably nice and cozy for most of you over there
in Chicago, enjoying a ball game, visiting friends and family, grilling that
steak, feeling good about yourself."

It is funny how people like this want to blame and paint American corporations
as evil, yet they build their business on startups and companies that could
have only been founded and successful here in the US. They hope and dream of
making it to Silicon Valley, raising money from US investors. It is total
hypocrisy. Don't like it, why don't you use only Serbian companies, banks, and
investors to power your startup? Oh that's right...

~~~
lern_too_spel
He's very clearly talking about Braintree, which is based in Chicago, not
about American corporations in general.

~~~
nodesocket
And tell me why Braintree has an obligation to take his business. He's in a
risky country Serbia, which has a high potential for chargebacks and fraud.

~~~
macintux
They have an obligation to provide the service they already agreed to, do they
not?

~~~
nodesocket
Wrong. Serbia is not in EU.

    
    
        You must also have a bank account with a US, European, Australian, Canadian, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysian, or New Zealand-chartered bank.

~~~
aianus
He specifically mentioned that he had a bank account in the EU in the comments

