[throwaway991199]

Sorry, but this is flat out wrong. I had a protracted exchange with your support and unfortunately I could not get past your first level support who and I do mean this harshly, sounded like they didn't pass first year business school.

I tried to speak to a manager who actually had a clue with business and was denied. In fact, I was pushed from pillar to post and spoke with 6 different people from the first tier support team.

It was at this point, I thought stripe was some fly by night operation, not garnering the level of praise that technical people here on hackernews were giving. Definitely not.

I think in future, should someone present you with a case that falls outside your remit. But is willing to do whatever it takes to work with you. You give them the benefit of the doubt and at least try to help them. In my case, you did not and that's not really great. In fact, you turned me into an enemy who went out to his community and turned a lot of people off you and onto your competitors.

[_quick_q]

What does this even mean? "...who and I do mean this harshly, sounded like they didn't pass first year business school."

[rhizome]

It's missing a comma and/or em dash.

"I could not get past your first level support, who -- and I do mean this harshly -- sounded like they didn't pass first year business school."

[_quick_q]

I understand the sentence. What I don't understand is why it is necessary for a support agent to have completed first year business school and why this is an insult (which I take as the intent).

[khedoros]

My guess is that they were talking to some kind of business support (as opposed to technical support), and it's a way of saying "they didn't know what they were talking about", when the reality was probably "I want to do something that their company doesn't want to support, and I'm upset that they didn't buy my argument".

They mentioned being a "case that falls outside [Stripe's] remit", and that Stripe didn't "give them the benefit of the doubt".

[rhizome]

Ah, that wasn't clear and punctuation was the most glaring issue with the sentence. Nevermind!

[collision]

I'm sorry to hear that. I'm guessing it's now too late, but if not I'd be happy to take a look at your case and escalate it. My email is [e-mail].

[throwaway991199]

The biggest problem I had. Is that shopify advertises payments with stripe. Shopify who does drop shipping and wholesale intermediary shipping.

But when looking at the terms of prohibited items in Stripe. Drop shipping is not allowed.

So what is the actual deal here? Shopify being a large entity can get away with it? But someone who has a business can't do it?

That's where the problem lies and good luck getting past the firewall of support.

Sorry, but I would have loved to have done business with Stripe. But until they actually actively start working with new clients. Good luck with that.

[jdc0589]

its really nice when people like you offer to do this, its a really great sign of good faith. But, reality is that a lot of people don't want to have to rely on special treatment to get something done. The fact is that the lowest level gatekeeper in your customer service organization is the biggest factor in how good a company's customer service is perceived to be. If I have a shit experience with the first person I contact in customer service, fight to speak to a manager, and then successfully resolve my issue, I'm still pissed and have a bad taste in my mouth. Its the exact same reason everyone hates "contact sales for pricing" statements on product/pricing pages. Its a bunch or red-tape that does nothing but take up too much of someone's time to figure out if they can successfully use a service or not. As awesome as it is when people like you offer to do this, it means your customer service group has critically failed just based on the fact that this has happened.

Rants aside, Stripe has the best technical/developer support of any company I have every worked with. The constant presence of real technical resources in public IRC channels is phenomenal. I've been able to fire up irc, ask a question, and get an answer in under 5 minutes many times. Well done. I have not worked with support on production issues with charges though; I can't speak to that.

[collision]

For sure. While I'm interested in fixing the specific case, I'm more interested in discovering the underlying systematic error and fixing the support experience in the cases I don't see.

And thanks for the nice words about IRC! The folks in #stripe on freenode are always happy to chat.