Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers
by lucas_adlp on Hacker News.
As it seemingly stands, it looks like Stripe is about to refund €147.000,00 worth of payments to my all of my customers due to 2 account closures (customers that have already received their orders). I have been running 2 eCommerce stores with Stripe, where we have shipped physical products out to our customers, from a local warehouse, which have been delivered within 5-10 business days of the order being placed. After about a month of running the stores, we received a notice about Stripe having to conduct a manual review on our account, and thus payouts would be frozen. We submitted the requested info, for both accounts. In the case of account 1 (which has approximately €101.000,00 on hold) led to an initial closure and a 120 day hold. But then later a notice about refunding all of these payments back to the customers. In the case of account 2 (which has approximately €46.000,00 on hold), Stripe deemed that we’ve been performing unauthorized charges on the account, and that they will have to refund all the “affected charges”. Now in the case of account 2, there are no unauthorized charges, all customers have received their products and we have tracking numbers to prove this. In the case of account 1, we requested a further review and got the reply that our money would be held for 120 days, and that “the affected card payments in 5 business days from the account closing day,” with a link referring to all the charges in our dashboard. Obviously we also have tracking numbers to prove that literally every succeeded payment from account 1 have received their products, and we have submitted this to Stripe as well. The reason for closure of both accounts is that our business is “high risk”. I’m not sure what this really means in our case, as we just sell consumer electronics in the $100-200 price range from a local warehouse (no dropshipping or anything like that). Effectively what I can take away from this, is that Stripe is about to refund all the payments from my customers which evens out approximately €147.000,00. When calculated in that stock has already been paid for and sent out, this translates to about a total net loss in the range of €250.000,00 for our business. I’m not sure if this is a result of Stripe’s automated fraud protection systems, or if an actual human has decided that it’s adequate to try and refund €147.000,00. Worth of customer payments that have already received their order. Regardless, I can understand an X day hold of the money, although it is annoying, but as far as I can tell, it most likely is not legal for Stripe to actually just refund customers who have already received their orders?
If the payments do end up being refunded, we will of course be taking legal action and contacting media outlets in efforts bring this story to the public eye, and to hold Stripe accountable for this. Has anybody had a similar experience where they lost over 6 figures worth of payments, basically for no good reason?