Stripe forcefully refunded most of the funds in our account. We tried to send them proof of shipment, but they just sent us back templates repeatedly. Has Stripe started using AI to replace human responses?
Get it touch with your account manager, this is what they are for. It is in their interest to build your business with Stripe and ensure that you have a smooth experience. Obviously there are cases where these sort of things have to happen, but they should be able to ensure that everything is fair and that you are listened to. Our account manager and others they put us in touch with at my previous place were helpful in this regard.
Every payment processor keeps the money for at least a short period of time. It's a trade-off between operational complexity (of many transfers), efficiency, accounting concerns, and fraud risk.
There are reasons why you might want this as a customer though, if you take dollars but don't have a USD denominated account (perhaps due to being abroad, regulatory requirements, etc), then you might want more control over batched payouts, especially if your bank charges a conversion fee to receive foreign currency.
There are all kinds of scenarios (e.g. fraud) where a CC refund is warranted even if you shipped the product, so without further details it's quite plausible that Stripe should have forcefully refunded the payment even taking your proof of shipment into account. Credit cards ensure that customers get all kinds of protections and in many (hopefully rare, but it depends on the industry) cases the risk falls on the merchant, that you might not eventually receive the money.
Can you share more detail about your business? What are you selling? What's your website? Happy to look into this. We often have to take action to protect Stripe, Stripe users, and Stripe users' customers, but we wouldn't do so without cause.
