Stripe Shut Us Down

[carol_ifyoucan]

We have been with stripe for over 2 years and on Sept 2, they shut us down without explanation. We tried to reach them and their help and call button have been disabled. We are a small online gym and since they shut us down, its been impossible to reach someone for help. Since then we have not been able to generate any revenue so we have lost thousands of dollars. We have employees that depend on us and not being to generate any income has been a tremendous burden. We decided to move to another payment partner and Stripe has still not sent us the file with our customer data so we can move on. What else do we have to do for the file migration? We have done and provided everything you requested and we have not heard from your technician and you are not responding to emails.

Carol Price 8136108294

[carol_ifyoucan]

Edwin, thank you. We finally got our file from Stripe Saturday night so that's good so we can move on with a new payment partner. We have lost 6 weeks of revenue that we most likely will not recoup. Stripe shut us down without giving us a chance to change whatever perceived behavior we violated. Even if we did, at least Stripe should have had the decency to give us a chance to fix it since this had not happened before that we're aware of. I'm assuming you moved things along a little quicker and I appreciate it. This is not good business practice that I had to hunt down an unknown site just to get help. You all need to make some improvement with your support teams because this was absolutely the most frustrating experience. I've worked production support in the past and if one of ours customers had this awful experience, I most likely would have been fired. I feel bad for the next person/company who has to go thru this pain...please..do better. You're messing with people's livelihoods

[nathanaldensr]

What is an "online gym?"

How easy was it for people to cancel their subscriptions? Did you experience lots of chargebacks?

[carol_ifyoucan → nathanaldensr]

online gym is videos that people can work out online rather than going to a physical gym People can cancel by going to portal at anytime and cancel their subscription No we did not have lots of chargebacks

[przeor]

This is why society shall more and more move into Open Finance

[Gigachad → przeor]

The future is more likely to be payment processing becoming a utility and government regulated so you can't just cut someone off without going through some official process like you would to cut off power or water.

[ano88888]

This is a big problem that needs to be solved. You business FB pages or stripe or ecommerce can get shut down anytime by an algorithm and there is not much you can do about it. No matter how good their algorithms are ,there are gonna be a lot of false negatives if the userbase is large enough.

[Cameri]

Perfect use-case to implement payments using the Lightning Network. Stripe and other intermediaries have their days counted.

[edwinarbus]

I work at Stripe—would you be able to email me at edwin@stripe.com and I can dig into this?

[Tomte → edwinarbus]

Again: Don't you think you should finally do something about your obvious support problems?

Every few weeks we get another Stripe support thread here, because people have learned this is the only way they can get support. I don't blame them, but I blame your company.

Nothing about it is intellectually stimulating.

It's nice to see HN solve someone's problem. Occasionally. And not always the same problem.

[shapefrog → Tomte]

One month and 14 days of customer "service" on hold, being ignored and genrally treated like shit.

Post on HN and publicly shame stripe for being shit at 2021-10-15T18:14:01 responded 2021-10-15T18:27:26 - 13 minutes 25 seconds to get a direct contact to answer your query.

There are some things money can't buy.

[joshxyz → Tomte]

Yea it'd not hard to get a feel their responses here are PR moves, not support moves. Come on. I love the collison brothers man but the frequency of this is absurd.

[uap → joshxyz]

Just a sign that the Compliance people own too much of the org. It's just the overinflated self-important (just a factual description, easy mods, here be no flames, this flaw is peculiar to the profession, almost occupational requirement) compliance person ego, they love to lock everything down and scream if they don't get their way, they feel they need to falsely portray themselves as the last bastion between order and chaos/success and jail/life and death. They love secrecy, the illusion of immutable process, and opaque irrevocable decisions.

The "support" failure is actually just a symptom of a "compliance cancer". Almost a cost of doing business in the financial sector since 9/11.

[natalyarostova → Tomte]

I assume they are working on it, and in the meantime employees are going out of their way to help where possible in a way that doesn’t scale.

[carol_ifyoucan → edwinarbus]

yes

[carol_ifyoucan → carol_ifyoucan]

Edwin, I sent you an email

[neatze]

this is unbelievable, HK is support forum for stripe, that's bad, to say the least.

[mhdhn → neatze]

Yep, just happened a month ago -- Stripe banned us for payment disputes but we never had a single dispute https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28522784

[readonthegoapp]

i had a pretty good impression of Stripe -- even signed up for an account recently.

but this sounds exactly like paypal.

[nottaylorswift]

Get on a plane and arrive at Stripe's corporate office in person. That's how you get your answer.

[rl1987 → nottaylorswift]

That assumes they will let you pass through reception without having a pre-arranged meeting.

[themdonuts → nottaylorswift]

Yep and it definitely qualifies as essential travel.