The service your provide is excellent, I adore the way Stripe does things in general, but your tech support absolutely positively blows.

We've been using Stripe for year and a half now and we had to contact support several times (6-7 ?). Every single time I would hear NOTHING back for few days, then I will log onto your IRC channel and start, basically, bitching. Lo and behold, not a minute later I get a private IRC message asking for an account ID and then I get a reply from the support in another 5 minutes. Invariably, it will start with a cry story how the support is unusually overloaded now.

This is absolutely unacceptable. In one case we had issues with two-factor authentication not working, and you'd think it warrants a more-or-less timely response, but, no, it still required the IRC trick to wrestle a reply from your support.

I'm sure being a CEO is a busy job, so I understand. And I'm sure he'll respond to OP. But keep in mind just because he posts his email publicly doesn't mean he's actually any more reachable for it.

That being said Patrick, you can't do this forever, the service & support ought to be well without the need of a call for attention.

Part of it is, I think, because we're growing quickly -- even for the same problematic case percentage, there are going to be more in absolute number. (And, as Stripe becomes more prominent, the cases that happen will themselves get more attention.)

In addition, the cases that get public attention generally aren't clear-cut. For example, the other discussion on HN a few weeks ago was about a marijuana-related business that most likely violated our ToS.

No warnings, no chance to appeal, no heads up and absolutly no possiblity to call them. Lost around half a million euros before we could get our customers exported to another payment processor. Thanks Stripe!

> We can terminate this agreement for any reason on two months’ notice and immediately in certain circumstances

It concerns me, as this still gives them full power to terminate the agreement immediately anytime they want. They never define what "certain circumstances" are, rather, they just provide one example.

- we determine in our sole discretion that you are ineligible for the Service because of the risk associated with your use of Stripe, including without limitation significant credit or fraud risk, or for any other reason;

- you do not comply with any of the provisions of this Agreement, or

On the US terms, I see the following sentence:

  Why do we pay that much again?

Honestly, right or wrong - I've seen very few 'startups' really grok effective customer service (I realize I'm over generalizing). Yes, a good Knowledge Base/FAQ and ticketing/email system is important - but you need a phone number, you need a call center probably too (even if its only 2-5 people answering the phone) - you need more than email and ticketing - most technology is complex enough that you need a person to talk to over the phone to hold your customers hands - IMO - this is even doubled for anything that need to integrate with your systems or has a device on your premises, but is also applicable to a complex web service - I strongly believe it drives long term customer retention and eases on boarding.

When you send an email to support@stripe.com (or any of the public email addresses they put on blog posts), it goes to Uservoice. Then it gets triaged, depending on the severity of the ticket, if it falls into account or developer related support it gets assigned into a queue (at times it gets put in the wrong queue and then has to get reassigned). But long story short there is a system.

Phone support is also being worked on were told.

Can you tell us how long it has been since you sent the email?

There must be some level of fraud prevention in any financial platform. You didn't give many details as to the type of charges you made or evidence past "no one charged back" as to how you made them. This is a public platform and I understand less than full disclosure but your narrative that:

1. You signed up

2. You charged people legitimately

3. You were cut off without notice

4. No one responded to multiple attempts over more than 1 business day

5. You were forced to take this action

Seems unlikely to be the full and absolute time line of events.

If it is, ok, post to HN and troll them. If not, is this really the medium? Doesn't stripe get a say on which transactions will and won't process on their own network?

Ironically, we've seen this before with the many complaints about PayPal.

Last year I was testing Stripe integration. I tried using my own credit card with a fake name. Surprise, it went through. I emailed Stripe support. After half a dozen emails discussing CC authorization I learned that Stripe does not and can not validate Name & Address on credit card.

Stripe told me that Credit Card companies do not disclose this data to Payment Processors like Stripe. Thus, Stripe simply passes on the name & address to the CC API.

Interestingly enough, Name & Address are NOT validated by major credit card companies. You can use junk names on your name & billing address and that will NOT stop your credit card transaction from going through.

Try for yourself next time you order something online. Makes me wonder why they even collect the data in the first place...

This isn't a Stripe-specific case. Moneris, a card processor in Canada, has a bunch of fields that a merchant can check on/off if they want them to validate the details during payment.

1) They have AVS checks, which can check the street number and zip code. But its up to us to decide what to do with this information (e.g. void the transaction).

2) They do not check anything else (country, name, state, phone, email, etc).

3) Some cards will fail if you put in the wrong expiration date, some won't - I would guess this is up to the card being charged. I get no information back when its incorrect but they let the charge go through.

You're right, you don't need the billing address to process a payment, although it's not true to say it's not used at all. Sometimes card companies do validate it, it depends on the type of transaction and the fraud profile. Often it's fuzzily matched, so name may not matter.

This sounds like a great way to get your account shut down.

His account was obviously activated for the purpose of submitting this post and he has provided NO follow up comments at this time. His post has been up for an hour.

Stolen cards, for instance, which may be more likely to happen in some industries than others.

Charities also have huge problems with CC fraud, as they're seen as an easy target to test card details against before making the "full" purchase elsewhere:

Actually, you do. In many cases, fraud follows a pattern. If you're a merchant, and you're getting a lot of fraudulent charges, you'll often get into a discussion with your upstream processor's fraud department about the details and how to mitigate it. I don't work in payments anymore, but as an example of how this works, I was talking a few weeks ago with a merchant who does tens of millions gross every year, but also faces five digits of fraudulent transactions. They sell car parts, so it's quite easy to buy one or two things for a lot of money. While working with their processor, they discovered that a significant amount of fraud was coming from two cities. And not just two cities, but two neighborhoods. And not just two neighborhoods, but two streets.

Both of the above companies have nearly 100% automated responses. With Amazon, if you get your selling account put on hold for any reason (even if it's by mistake through their automated bots), you will not be able to talk to anyone on the phone or through email. Your account is also put on hold for 90 days and your money might get transferred back to you when they feel like it.

It happened to me a few years back. A customer was ordering merchandise, stealing it, and filing disputes with Amazon. I wasn't able to block the customer, because it's not possible with their current system. Support was unhelpful (automated copy/paste responses) and they pretty much sided with the customer every time and deemed my account a "threat". Before this, 100% feedback.

>Video game or virtual world credits: Sale of in-game currency unless the merchant is the operator of the virtual world

I am.

>Virtual currency or stored value: Virtual currency that can be monetized, resold, or converted to physical or digital products and services or otherwise exit the virtual world (e.g., Bitcoin); sale of stored value or credits maintained, accepted and issued by anyone other than the seller

It can't and isn't.

http://www.rbcroyalbank.com/RBC:z7TrmawYUA4BRAAwmCMAAAD8/bus...

http://www.tdcanadatrust.com/products-services/small-busines...

http://www.scotiabank.com/ca/en/0,,557,00.html

https://www.bmoharris.com/us/small-business/services/merchan...

We eventually gave up, as no one from Stripe answered with other than pre-written answers. I even tried pinging them on IRC, but they couldn't help with these matters.

Still, I subscribed to their 'mailing list' in order to be notified whenever they would launch. Last year, I've heard that they were about to do it and eventually announced the market as 'Beta', whatever that means. Again, I subscribed to their list, this time, in order to be 'invited for their private beta'. I'm pretty sure I was at the top of their list, because back then not many people knew about stripe and further, less people from Mexico were interested with them; tbh, nowadays Stripe is something that you don't hear in the field in Mexico, at all.

To this day I haven't heard from them, and for what I see Stripe here in Mexico operates more like some kind of secret society than a real business. My point is, I'm not doing business with them, and the reason is that it is clear that they're not here to offer a payment solution for developers in general, they are just here to hang out and provide the payment backbone for a few of their friends, and that's it.

Even if I'm later deemed 'worthy of their attention', I won't integrate their payments platform with any kind of serious project that I would develop, and the reason is that they will always look at me as 'just another guy' and whenever I come up with some real problem that would need their attention they would just check out their A-list, realize that my name is not there and pretty much let me fuck up; just like it's doing it with many of the other guys that are posting here.

For the moment I'll stick with PayU which I think is, by the way, a much better payment platform than Stripe if you take out all the 'pay with a single JSON Curl' fanfare.

Every time I have had a question about functionality, needed someone to take a look at test cases in my account, etc.., someone from Stripe has ALWAYS been available in IRC and quick to respond.

In case of Stripe i sent last week a question in reply to an email from them from last year, there is no ticketing system it seems I got replies from 2 different people today after a week (not the same person one who originally was friendly and talked to me and might not be working there). Both answers were somewhat positive but a bit contradictory.

It is kind of sad that the support isn't more expedited for things like this.

Seems like more and more people are turning to HN in order to get visibility and get their Stripe problems resolved. That is quite unfortunate...

I run a small SaaS company. We process all of our transactions through Stripe (6 figures). I was a huge fan of them up until last year, when I had to deal with their support team for the first time.

If they ever get back to you, they take forever to respond. When I dealt with them, they were a pain. They just don't seem to care.

Fraud is a sensitivity/specificity problem. For sensitivity, Stripe wants to detect as many actual fraud cases as possible, because undetected fraud is expensive. For specificity, they want as few false positives as possible, because false positives mean angry customers who feel mistreated.

- Strongly regulated banks/strong consumer protection in financial services.

- Good merchant customer service.

I used to work on fraud operations at a payment processor and there was always more to the story. There were four categories that account's broadly fell into:

* The quiet fraudster. These would either have a scam business model with real victims attempting to pay, or would not have a business and were using stolen payment details to pay themselves. The quiet fraudster would not argue when you closed their account - they would just sign up again and try a different approach to get round your system.

* The loud fraudster (the vast majority of fraudsters). These come in all shapes and sizes. They were often the most obvious frauds (100 payments from the same IP at our max payment amount, within 10 minutes of each other). Unfortunately they sometimes came in the form of someone deluded - for example the man that sold 'magic beans' that cured AIDS. These are the loud fraudsters because they will either shout down the phone at your support team (shouting never helps when calling support - by the way), or try and drum up negative PR to create pressure.

* The accidental fraudster. These people have good intentions, but are none-the-less breaking the rules. For example, migrating all of your customers over to a new payment supplier by filling out a new payment form on their behalf (note - I worked for a payment processor that was not based on cards - this method may be allowed for CC though I doubt it). The accidental fraudster might also have fraudulent customers paying them yet be a legit business - for example online sellers of jewellery will have a lot of people pay with stolen details hoping that the business will ship the goods before the payment is flagged. Sometimes you can work with the business to fix the issue, many times you have to let them go (remember, they will have all the signs of an obvious fraudster - so you have to be sure that their story is true).

* The innocent. As you can imagine, sometimes there are people that have all the signs of a fraudster yet are perfectly legitimate. There can be many reasons for this.

===

Without a lot more information, I cannot begin to speculate what category the author falls into - hopefully one of the latter two.

Also, Bitcoin is totally an invention by the Fed to ween people off fiat, despite the fact the Bitcoin network and its total overall volume are a joke compared to global currency trade, and basically worse, or completely irrelevant, for consumers in pretty much all cases.

What would Bitcoin solve that the USD doesn't?

Why would the world accept a technological "solution" whose implementation already contains dire technical problems?

What makes you think hyperinflation is a realistic outcome?

I find it thoroughly hilarious that when someone pokes at your original assertion that "the whole monetary system is going to collapse" - a completely unsubstantiated claim that is hilarious at face value - you shriek about "well what about hyperinflation?!?!?! explain that, checkmate bro"

I could ask you "what does Bitcoin do that USD doesn't", "how will bitcoin topple an international system bound by trade and agreement to minimize risk", "what about bitcoin's obviously huge deflation problem", "what about the huge amount of flaws in bitcoin's implementation today", or - just spitballing here - "why the fuck would super hyperinflation actually happen", which was your original claim...

But why bother? It's much more easy to watch you try to justify it in weirdo ways with claims about infinite money and what amounts to bigfoot. You know, the same way people like Ron Paul robots have been doing since 1981: http://ron-paul.tumblr.com/post/25365125/i-believe-such-a-st....

The only difference now is instead of libertarians having a goldbug, they have a bitcoin bug. Or maybe Ron Paul was right and hyperinflation has actually been going on since 1981, omg?!?!

Sorry to burst your bubble brother, if you don't think solar radiation management("chemtrails") is happening you're wrong again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4s1qNJpko8

As for the Harvard results, the results aren't as important - it was meant as the joke that "The government is doing it to control us". You know - the conspiracy theory, just like all the other ones, which if you wanted to counter my claim (which wasn't even the point for fucks sake), you would need evidence of. As opposed to some chemicals having unintended side effects, which is possible (and happens).

I like how you also conveniently ignored the rest of my post, and didn't actually explain your point about inflation. Instead, you just said "well, it's obvious bro". How explanatory!

http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/13/down-the-blockchain-rabbit-...