[edwinwee]

There are a bunch of factors—we look at your refund and chargeback rates, then your revenue and how much you have in your Stripe balance. For macro factors, the card networks may also sense an uptick in refund requests depending on the product/service you're selling.

That said, I see your email into our support team and we're taking another look at this now.

[urda]

It's a bit horrifying it takes a disgruntled HN post and the pure chance you happened across it. It's also discomforting how comfortable Stripe employees like yourself think holding 50% of someone's earning for any amount of time is acceptable. I really don't care if Stripe is HN's baby, this is awful customer service and gives me great pause in recommending or using Stripe.

[pull_my_finger]

I feel like these posts should be disallowed. Seems like Stripe is using HN as a free help forum, and it's customers have accepted that this is the place to go when you need to talk to a human. I don't think HN should encourage it, and I don't know why we all play along. I've seen a solid handful or two of these posts, and most of the time users aren't looking for discussion, only enough attention to get the Stripe team to act. My opinion only, obviously I sympathize with OP whose just trying to get their money and this seems to be the tried and true way to get a response, but I definitely don't think it adds anything positive to the site other than a recurring warning to other would-be Stripe customers.

[cft]

HN should encourage it, because startup founders read HN. They should think twice risking their business existence, after seeing this benevolent approach.

[zem]

> other than a recurring warning to other would-be Stripe customers

that seems like an exceptionally high-value positive in a site with a large number of users who need payment services.

[DANmode]

> I don't know why we all play along

Sunlight kills all infection.

[Frondo]

Sunlight only works reasonably well for waterborne pathogens, and only when you've got time.

As with disinfecting anything, and especially for societal issues, we need more than sunlight alone.

[111111IIIIIII]

Tell that to Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, or one of the billions of working families all over the world that everyone knows is getting f*cked over on a constant basis.

Sunlight is not a disinfectant. Better to try gasoline.

[danielmarkbruce]

These types of companies are often frauds (anything involving large amounts charged for travel, or housing of some sort). A bunch of big charges comes in, and then months later there are massive chargebacks and the company in question no longer exists. Stripe is left holding the bag. Their only option with these large charges for services to be delivered in the future is to not release funds until they are quite certain there won't be a charge back.

For every instance of what appears to be bad behavior by a payments company, consider the angle of the fraudster. They are really screwing things up for everybody.

[matthewdgreen]

In a working payment system, the scenario where someone initiates a valid dispute nine months after the fact would be extremely rare: it would be limited to a few types of physical card theft where the card owner is unable to report the card missing for some relatively unusual reason. We just don’t have a working payment system, so unfortunately this stuff is incredibly common and everyone has to suffer because of it.

[danielmarkbruce]

There are genuine cases (travel and lodging are the obvious ones) where people tend to pay for things months in advance. I don't see it going away. If you can come up with a cheap, effective, convenient payment method to cover these things, you are on a winner. I don't think it's possible because the time horizon creates risk, there is no avoiding it.

[pgodzin]

The alternative is likely not being able to work with the business at all due to their risk profile and chargeback rates.

[gruez]

That seems... better? At least you know what you're in for (ie. you can only take crypto or go with a risk-taking payment processor that has an explicit net 120 payout schedule), so you can plan your business around it.

[dmitrygr]

As always, why bother having real support when you can instead wait for paying customer to bitch publicly on HN?

Sickening.

[orf]

Sickening is hardly the word for a comms lead of Stripe being the first reply to a post about a customers issue, complete with some informative context and saying they will double check the issue.

[dmitrygr]

Are you new here? This website seems to be the only way to get human help from stripe. THAT is sickening.

[orf]

What would you say the percentage of the total support requests that Stripe receives per day is compared to issues raised on HN?

[okokwhatever]

Not the place for many reasons. As an example this discussion should not be publicly indexable whenever a customer Googles this same problem in the future.

Basic Marketing and Customer Care Management.

[jononomo]

When you hold on to someone's money for an extremely long time, do you earn any interest on that money?

[shrubble]

Yes, since it is all going into the same bank account... $600K on 9 months at 5% (best I see is 5.25% for 1 year https://www.bankrate.com/banking/cds/cd-rates/ ) would be 75% of $30K = $22.5K .

[cjcampbell]

Just wanted to say I appreciate seeing the responsiveness here. First comment on the thread even. Always better if it doesn’t reach this point, but it’s nice to know you can get a human’s attention one way or another.

Hoping to @edwinwee will share the outcome for other businesses who might need to evaluate Stripe.

[dvt]

You know what would be better? Maybe a support email? Or this crazy thing called a 1-800-number? The fact that Stripe de facto uses HN as their support forum and that people are lauding them for it is pretty laughable.

[dmitrygr]

Search this website. Outcome is always the same: something resolved just this once. No procedural changes made. Stripe remains unreachable unless you get enough upvotes on HN

[x0x0]

The outcome is not always, or perhaps even often, the same.

The last time I paid attention to one of these complaints, someone was using stripe to sell cellphone accessories (and yes, at least on my Stripe application, they asked what I was selling.)

After selling accessories for a while, he then used it to sell a minivan, and had a tantrum when Stripe -- quite reasonably -- said this flags all the flags, and Stripe was going to hold onto the money until they were sure things were kosher.

Getting dollars before multiple months post transaction basically leaves someone holding a bag of risk, and if you act shady AF, you can't be surprised if Stripe declines to hold that bag of risk for you.

[tredre3]

The outcome isn't always the same.

It's 50/50:

- The poster was doing something shady and upon further investigation it turns out the situation is warranted

- The poster was indeed let down by a broken support system and Stripe staff chimes in to save the day