Stripe Merchant Payment Stripe merchant accountStripe paymentsStripe Payment processing Stripe ruins Christmas and holds funds from sales USA Internet

Stripe is unfortunately ruining my life my business, my employees, and Christmas for their kids. 

We have been running various websites for many years and have always used traditional merchant accounts.  Unfortunately, we run many websites, and with traditional merchant accounts the processors want an account for each site and business.  When you have 15 sites, having 15 merchant accounts in nearly impossible to manage and we found ourselves creating more problems trying to manage each one vs finding a processor like stripe that we could create sub accounts or something of the sort and be up and running with each new website we launched in hours or less.  We were finally making progress and excited to begin using stripe.  Money was flowing, deposits were coming, orders were being shipped, chargebacks were low and next to nothing.  Refunds, were only our own transactions that we were testing our sites with.

Things were good as all stories start out in the beginning.  Unfortunately that lasted just a short while. We began to slowly receive notifications for each account one by one over time with each notification having different reasons.  None of this made sense to us, we were shipping orders, refunds were low, sites were doing good, chargebacks were next to nothing, and everything was in place.  The relationship should be perfect match and fit. 

Recently as each account was being shut down, they were starting to place holds, change deposits to 7 days, then no deposits, and a constant loop of scheduling transfers that never happened.  You can’t reach them, explain, discuss, or anything.  I have managed to get some email responses here and there with very little information flowing, we are left with no choice but to share our story and hopefully avoid this happening to others. 

We now have around $15,000 tied up with stripe.  That is a lot of money, and we are 9 days away from Christmas, we have employees to pay this week, they have Christmas to buy for their kids, travels to see family, all to be destroyed over Stripe and their lack of willingness to work with their supporters.  I was a big fan, loved their concept and ease to do business.  I was like in my head, saying Finally a company that gets it and if for the small businesses out there.  I love Stripe. 

That is all being erased with the stress and frustrations they have caused on our business and our personal lives.  We need our cash flow and rely on it to operate.  They never inquired to see if our orders were fulfilled, customers happy, or anything just shut us down with no information or reasons that we could maybe provide documents, information to satisfy their concerns.  While I realize businesses like theirs have to manage risk, I respect that, but did they reach out, inquire, or anything? NO. Worst of all, CHRISTMAS IS RUINED for many!

I also realize there is lots of fraud out there, they have to take preventative measures, but don’t hurt the good guys, or penalize the ones who run a legitimate operation.

As we are respected in our industry already which is internet marketing, It is not difficult to prove that a company who by procedure does not communicate by telephone with people, and has more negative press than a presidential nominee already ( as we learned in doing diligence on this issue ) is engaged in unreasonable business practices and unfairness to its clients. We will show this. Sorry your "Hands are tied". We were hoping for a more favorable response as my concern is for the survival of our small business and my staff and their families.

This is December 16th today. We will not be able to pay our employees for Christmas without our money. We have been effectively shut down by Stripes actions. Our business will be entirely shut down until we can reapply, open new merchant accounts and go through the painstaking process of integrating the new processors etc to our websites. Stripe didn’t provide a shred of evidence of chargebacks, or what risk level they speak of. Please define how you qualify "Higher than normal risk". Because form the outside, it looks like you are using MY employee's paychecks, to fund their company. However; we can absolutely prove we have shipped and continue to ship products. We can absolutely prove any chargebacks or disputes are handled by our accounting staff, we can absolutely prove that the level or "risk" you assess, is probably not based on anything specific to our industry or actual performance.

Stay clear of Stripe if you want to avoid things like the above, shame on me for taking a chance with a company that does not provide phone support or publish a phone number at all.