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UPDATE : Stripe just decided to refund a further €68.000,00 which puts my now total loss around €150.000,00 (Stock + marketing cost factored in).

Again, Stripe's reasoning seems to be that the charges are unauthorised, which is completely impossible since 80% of the transactions have been authorised with 3DS and the customers have gone through a so-called "challenge flow".

We will try and reach out to our customers and reclaim the payment, but I'm not sure how this will go, or how much we can reclaim.

I hope my experience can be a warning to anyone considering using Stripe for their business.

FURHTER UPDATE : We're now able to access the acocunt and can see that "only" €28k was refunded, I assume that Stripe's reasoning is that these payments were unauthorised.

Of course these payments are not unauthorised, and this can even be proven by most of them being 3DS authenticated.

We've also received 2 new notices about both accounts balances being refunded on the 11th, one can hope that these are automated responses, and that all that Stripe wants to refund is now refunded.

UPDATE : Stripe has just closed our account without further notice and refunded the whole balance.

When we go to our dashboard we get a query saying "Unable to load this view", so I guess that's €250.000,00 that have just vanished.

Please consider if you want to use Stripe for your business.

The only people that were in touch with me were support agents that were repeating what was said in the automated notification about payments being issued to customers after.

To me it looks like it took this post, a reddit post and Twitter mentions to get someone above the "normal" support to look into the matter, and put the automated refunds on pause while you investigate the case for a third time.

Nothing personal against you, but when almost 150k is held from us, and then decided by what seems to be a robot to refund all of these payments within 5 business days (although we've given you tracking numbers on the very first manual reviews where issuing refunds weren't even a topic) I hope it's quite clear that we're not professing to have a bad day, but rather that were acting in urgency to get fairly treated.

I'm not one to post on social media / publicly about my business generally, but when this is the only way to get your attention and I have roughly €250k euros at stake, what else should I do?

Hopefully we can resolve this (in a way where neither of us loses any money), without me having to take legal action against Stripe.

No, there's tracking numbers for all orders in both accounts.

We've received 1 dispute in roughly 700 payments, which was just a mistake on the customers end.

Generally, all of our customers are quite happy with our products.

We've sent out products to all the customers that have paid.

Stripe is now "considering" refunding all these customers, while holding 150k of our generated revenue.

Due to the products being bought and shipped, (and not even factoring in marketing costs) this easily equates to a total net loss of 250k for our business.

I cannot be super specific due to the nature of business strategy.

If I share accurate info about what and how we sell things, It's very easy for opportunists and competitors to undertake us in this specific project while our processing solution is down temporarily.

What I will say though, is that we're not speaking vapes or anything borderline, more like kitchen and household appliances, and so on.

I'm also not fond of using HN for this sort of thing, but for a non-bootstrapped business, 250k isn't peanuts.

As much as this is a request for acutal support from Stripe, I also do hope that readers who are in a business of taking online payments will become fully aware of the risk of using Stripe, since I weren't (and now I'm in a situation of possibly losing 250k).