Oh Paypal? Look up the horror stories there. Or directly work with a legacy provider like FirstData? They will also freeze your account and won't even accept you if you just have just $3k of sales.
Isn't it interesting that credit card processors really like to give crappy customer support and enjoy freezing accounts? Is it because they just attract misanthropic people? If only a caring company that didn't freeze accounts and gave wonderful support could enter, the field would be better. /s
Actually, the problem is super structural:
- Due to payment processing regulations, there is a fixed overhead from taking a small merchant on. (KYC, AML, ensuring you're not selling drugs). This makes tiny merchants incredibly unprofitable to begin with. Legacy providers like FirstData will reject you outright or make you pay fees to onboard. They will also make you fill out pages of paper forms and put the time cost on you to verify you're a legit business.
We as a society have said the gatekeeping features of finance are more important that making sure tiny businesses have access to payment infrastructure. We should change this parameter if we truly cared about this. I suspect we don't.
- Merchants simply race to the CC provider that is easiest to set up or have lowest fees. If you were OK paying a couple of hundred dollars of setup fees to, you know, properly reimburse your vendor for vetting you, or pay 5% fees for a high risk (read: tiny merchant) specialty account, you probably wouldn't have been frozen like this, at least without them calling you.
This is exactly the problem with Google services. Are you paying Google a bunch of money? If you are a high level enterprise account where the fully-burdened cost of a 1-hour customer support call (~$100) is a small part of your yearly net margin to Google, I bet they would take your call.
Reach out to local credit unions or even smallish bank. They usually are middleman to firstdata, chase paymentech etc. But you get a dedicated account rep at cost of nominal monthly fee. Rates usually are competitive often lower than what stripe and paypal offers.
That people would prioritize ui and initial setup costs over payment processing reliability is insane to me.
There is a small monthly fee and the processing fee is variable depending on the card. Plain debit/check card under 2%, compared to an airline rewards card that’s more like 4%…
I’m not even eligible for a Stripe account because a large part of my business could be called computer repair and that is explicitly disallowed.
Square is one. https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-api
FWIW If you want to be able to quickly switch payment providers without stripe (or any provider) holding your customer's payment info hostage, you should consider using a PCI tokenization service like BasisTheory.com
https://reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/wa1zob/_/ihyq7tl...
As usual, there’s always an undisclosed fact that changes the narrative and explains the ban. Whether this should trigger Stripe’s scorched earth mechanisms is another matter.
I'm actually just starting a business using Stripe for handling payments, and this makes me very concerned.
Is there an alternative service one could use? Is there a way not to give these shady companies power to steal all my money?
For local businesses, perhaps your local bank has a better solution? They will be cheaper (if they use networks other than Visa/Master), and often has zero fees when you withdraw money to a bank account.
Here in my country, for a business that only caters to local customers, I pay about 2% for payments with no fixed fee and no fee for withdrawals, which happens daily. I can directly call the person who handles my queries, and charge backs have never been anything but a few quick clicks with no mind games. All I do is redirect the user to the payment page, and validate the payment upon arrival. The UX isn't as good as Stripe of course, but many of the locals are quite used to that UI anyway.
We see this in many circumstances: centralization and scale are great for efficiency, but bad for resilience.
There are many alternative services listed in other comments, but to be clear, every single one of them has the power to do exactly what Stripe did.
There is no way to accept credit card payments without accepting that power to freeze suspicious incoming payments, simply because fundamentally credit card payments are not final and can (and often will) be reversed afterward, and if someone promised to never freeze merchants' funds, every fraudster in the world would come to try out their services, bankrupting them in the process.
But; I have run 4 different businesses on stripe over about 6 years and have never had a serious issue. Yes there have been ups and downs but even with no phone number I would have to rate their support head and shoulders above most. Maybe 24-36 hours for a response, but we always got one, and in most cases it solved the issue.
We are still with them.
Mollie for one is complete garbage.
It comes in really, really handy when your tiny 1-person company outlives your giant multinational payment provider. Happened to me a few times now, I'm on to my 3rd (4th?) provider in 20 years. There's a tendency for Borg-like consolidation in the payments industry (eg Avangate acquired 2Checkout, then were bought by Verifone). Anyone who lived through the Digital River era will know what I mean.
If you haven't done that code abstraction, imagine that you're suddenly unable to take any payments or make any sales and you are unable to do so until you rewrite all your payment processing code. That can be a long outage.
Having a backup is also useful when a customer's card gets declined by an overly zealous fraud screen at one provider. You can give that customer a "promocode" that changes the logic of your checkout flow and redirects processing to a different payment processor.
And having different processors active also lets you add different payment options (eg maybe your primary processor doesn't support Alipay or Pay With Amazon). But in practice that turned out not to be a good reason for me, Paypal/Visa/MC/Amex/Optima covered almost 100% of customers anyway. For the tiny handful that use checks I can handle that manually.
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It's hardly the only charge of this nature.
Really? There are entire classes of retailers where that would be a truly exceptional event. I don't know if that's true of the OP (post removed), but if their average transaction is $27 or something this would rightly trigger alarm bells. If they are in fact being stonewalled on support that's pretty inexcusable though.
1. Customer of retailer buys something with stolen cc, retailer is none the wiser, although Stripe has sophisticated techniques that suggest it might be fraud. Probably looks like a very ordinary transaction. e.g. person filling up gas tank with stolen card.
2. Accomplice of retailer buys something with "stolen" cc, retailer in on it. Probably looks like unusual transaction. e.g. person buying 10 laptops, reselling for cash, waiting until retailer gets money from Stripe, does a chargeback, retailer disappears, they split all the cash.
If it's the first case, sure, tell the retailer. If it's the second (or it could be the second, which I think is what might be the case here), you probably maintain radio silence while you investigate.
Edit: also, by all the documentation the OP wants to provide, it sounds like they understand why it could look like the second. If it's the first they should understand there's nothing they can provide that would suggest it's not a stolen card - it has very little to do with them.
Can they legally give that considering its, most likely, private customer information? If they give detailed information out in a "Detailed" post mortem... isn't that proof that they are an untrustworthy entity?
Just seems to me this is a damned if you do, damned if you don't attitude against Stripe (or, any company in general that has a complaint but can't do a "detailed" public response because, well, that's private information... .. . )
The major difference is that some platforms offer more hand-holding support and some don't, but even those who will talk to you (e.g. your local bank) can and sometimes will refuse unblocking such funds for a prolonged time.
When I see Stripe's apology here it will not be enough for me - not at least without a detailed blog post / postmortem.
Until/if that moment happens, I'll regard Stripe as an untrustworthy entity and will recommend doing the same to do anyone I do business with.
Zero tolerance for Google-style algo-decisions and stonewalling.