This exact thing happened to us. We have a store located in Puerto Rico and Shopify would randomly stop payouts every 3-4 months or so because they needed to re-verify our owner address information. Apparently, most of Puerto Rico is not verifiable by their shitty address verification API, so it triggers the freeze every time it retries the verification. It was one of the most frustrating experiences I've ever had and cost us thousands of dollars.
Stripe also did the same exact thing for very similar reasons and at one point we had over $300,000 USD frozen with them, which was basically our entire monthly payroll expense. We had to explain to our bank why our accounts were suddenly drained. This one was worse than Shopify's since we actually never received any communications notifying that this was going to happen. At least we got an email from Shopify that we just hadn't noticed.
They're all broken. And Know Your Customer needs to eat shit and die.
Address validation is the biggest piece of automation that needs to stop.
You're not going to stop people from misentering addresses, and many countries have terrible validation or streets that don't exist yet take forever to show. Or the system that suddenly decides to start doing validation doesn't actually accept valid addresses.
Companies think automation can handle it, but it's an absolute nightmare.
> You're not going to stop people from misentering addresses, and many countries have terrible validation or streets that don't exist yet take forever to show.
I live in a place where the official address changed: as in we got a letter (in 2016 I think) from the town hall saying "your address is now ... and you have to ask everybody to mail you at that new address". Well... Most utility bills' systems have been programmed in a way that make it impossible to keep the same "installation ID" (as in the ID on our electrical install) while changing the address. Somehow "the street got a new name" is a case that had never been planned.
The implications are wild (for example the bank refusing to open an account because the official, legal, address doesn't match the address on the utility bill and then the contry's IRS thinking there are shenanigans going on).
Address validation is not 100% reliable, so systems should have an override "Yes, this is my address" option. Unfortunately many forms assume address validation is foolproof, so there is no mechanism for entering in your actual address. It just gets rejected.
As a customer, I wanted to buy something and the website wouldn't accept my address (since it wouldn't accept any "/" characters). Guess what? There are plenty of addresses in the US with "/", such as 50 1/2 Foobar Street. Address validation does not always work, so companies shouldn't act that way.
Try living in a newly built building. Every developer seems to be under the impression that if an address doesn't exist in the Google maps API, then it doesn't exist at all.
Yes. I’ve stumbled upon some organizations in small towns in the US that want all postal mail going to their PO Box, nothing going to their physical address.
The small-town post office will sometimes _delete_ the physical address in the mail system so the actualy physical address is completely in-valid (or worse gets autocorrected to an address a mile away).
Turns out FedEx and UPS base their address validation off USPS and also don’t ship to PO Boxes.
In "federal-style" countries like USA, it is possible for some jurisdictions to have adequate validation while other jurisdictions (e.g. the rural county where I live) do not.
Bitcoin literally fixes this. Bitcoin is the first public infrastructure for sending money online without intermediaries and trusted third parties. This is the problem it solves, yet any mention of this on HN gets downvoted.
You can use something like https://btcpayserver.org/ and be your own payment processor with very little work.
Kind of frustrating that HN hates bitcoin so much, that even under link/article about small merchant getting harassed by shopify/stripe, they would rather downvote any mention of real solution..
It may fix this particular problem, on one side of the transaction, but it creates new ones. What if I, as a purchaser, want to dispute my purchase? What if I was ripped off? What if the product was broken, not as advertised, etc. I like knowing there is recourse through chargebacks.
For example, I rented a vacation home last year, on VRBO, and the highly unusual contract (that was not shared until after the purchase) made me very uncomfortable. As an aside, I was also surprised that I was billed directly by the rental company via Stripe, rather than through VRBO. I requested a refund within an hour of booking.
For two weeks, I attempted to contact the rental company. I never received a single acknowledgement from them, and VRBO provided zero support. The only way I was able to get my money back was with a chargeback, showing my request for a refund within the cancellation window.
I am 100% confident that if this had been a bitcoin transaction I would have lost that money. I would also expect a rise in bad actors abusing that lack of recourse if bitcoin did increase in popularity for payment. In my mind, that is the challenge that crypto needs to solve before it can become widely adopted as a payment option.
Forget chargebacks: the wildly fluctuating price of BTC means that even a good-faith retailer can't offer refunds without risk to either the buyer or the seller. The price of BTC has risen almost 40% in the past month; how do you settle this without either side feeling like they've gotten ripped off?
I agree that this is still a challenge that needs to be solved in better ways. There are some solutions possible. For example OpenBazaar used 2-of-3 multisig escrow. Bisq is using security deposits, limits and reputation. For some large transactions there are legal escrow services. But for small regular transactions with most merchants, there is no good standardized solution so far. You just have to do your research about about the counterparty and trust the merchant as far as transaction goes.
Or for services/goods that requires this kind of leeway, use an escrow.
Yes it does introduce a third party, but the point is that compared to the current system there is no other option for the many cases in which you don't need don't want to use an escrow, the payment processor invariably act as such and can shutdown your business at will.
It's a system you already use if you use credit cards. The payment processor play this role by assuming the counterparty risk and issuing chargebacks when they deem it appropriate.
I don’t know if BTC fully fixes this, but I agree that crypto in general is heading down the path that will likely fix this. And agreed, HN continues to hate crypto due to 99% of it being garbage, and ignoring the 1% that is actually revolutionary.
Because you are familiar with fiat/cash and its risks and you use crypto only for "crypto" stuff not to buy your groceries.
You won't send cash to someone you don't really trust, would you? How is crypto different? With paypal you get some "security" with the tradeoff that sometimes you won't get it(i.e you get scammed either as buyer or seller) and many times it just pissesoff both the sender and receiver using "fraud detection" and treating both as criminals.
The main issue with crypto is the exchange rate and volatility. The local ATM gives you a shitty rate on bitcoin and by the time you spend it its value may be lower or higher by a big margin. The merchant may experience a similar issue.
There are some ways how you can solve this. You can convert to and from stablecoins. You can use hedging and use cfd or futures to keep your bitcoin on stable fiat value. Depending on what you need, this can be done on exchange, with some payment gateway or even trustlessly via smart contracts.
So, I use fiat to buy bitcoin, convert it to a stablecoin, go buy lunch, convert it back to bitcoin, then the merchant converts it back to fiat. Why jump through all those hoops to buy lunch? or anything for that matter. At this point i could just use gold.
I'm talking about the reality and in the real world the solution you propose does not exist. For some reasons stablecoins do not seem to be used outside few online exchangers.I can't find them available at the local atm.
Ohh so the old "paypal" issues are back. Fortunatrly there is a true peer to peer payment technology: "crypto". Unfortunately it's been hijacked by speculative "investors"
I don't know, but we've tried our hardest to migrate all of our software as far away from Evertec as possible. We're still stuck with their payroll software that still requires a Java Applet on Internet Explorer. It's horrible.
Stripe also did the same exact thing for very similar reasons and at one point we had over $300,000 USD frozen with them, which was basically our entire monthly payroll expense. We had to explain to our bank why our accounts were suddenly drained. This one was worse than Shopify's since we actually never received any communications notifying that this was going to happen. At least we got an email from Shopify that we just hadn't noticed.
They're all broken. And Know Your Customer needs to eat shit and die.