Can you email me (smca@stripe.com) with more detail? I'll look into this.
We don’t typically comment in detail on individual cases, but we do think it’s important for onlookers to know that we take every single case like this seriously. It looks like what happened here was an edge case involving SEPA payments that resulted in a dispute rate that’s far in excess of what’s generally permitted by financial partners. When we do this, our interventions are partly to protect financial partners/Stripe, partly to protect end customers, and in part to protect the businesses themselves. (For example, Visa will fine businesses that maintain high dispute rates.) This case is actually a bit more complicated still, since you said that you’re using Connect. In these cases, we also take seriously the importance of defending the platform (i.e. you) against users who are trying to defraud you.
More broadly, we work hard to balance the rules of the financial ecosystem, ease of use, protection against fraudulent businesses, consumer protection, and continuity for businesses. We support millions of businesses across dozens of countries and payment methods, and we discover new scenarios every day. We plan to blog about our work here in more detail before too long (including some of our key metrics). If any HNers have suggestions as to what we should include, feel free to reply here. We’ll try to share anything helpful that’s not too sensitive.
Before you edited the answer it said you cannot sustain clients with more than 0.1% chargeback rate. Or 1%, iForgot.
This is all fine when your clients have 1 million sales per month. But in this case they have umm... "To put this into context, we are talking about a small local gym, with 33 active memberships."
You need a better metric than 0.1% or 1% or just turn down small clients? They're just disproportionate support costs anyway so they shouldn't be allowed to run a business online :)
I see no valid excuses here. "we process millions of transactions so we can't provide proper service" no, just like every other buisiness that wants to scale to collecting money from millions of users while only paying tens of employees, profit margin and founder pay is no fundamental excusable reason for doing a bad job at your job.
That makes sense for cards but if most of the payments are SEPA transfers, then it doesn't make that much sense since there's no chargebacks for SEPA transfers.
Maybe the issue is a fraud system designed for cards that's not well thought out for other forms of payments.
This is exactly my point, SEPA DD is by design high dispute because the customer can dispute a payment on a no-question-asked basis over a span of 8 weeks.
This can also happen due to insufficient funds, or as it happens if the mandate you (Stripe) send them is wrong. We previously have an issue with this exact same account where the reason for the disputes was an incorrect mandate and we were refunded for those.
There’s no chargeback for SEPA transfers that are initiated by the customer, but the OP is using SEPA direct debit which is initiated by the vendor and has chargeback.
an exception to that is Bank of America Merchant services. I have 2 clients with chargeback ratio above 3% for close to 5 years now, and processing volume about $1MM a month. I imagine they are simply too small of a fish for BOA to care about their CB ratio. I seen them getting accounts shut down with basically any other processor, most sensitive being Wells Fargo underwriter but somehow they remain open with BOA so maybe its worth a shot?
BOA implements First Data gateway by default these days, so most likely your previous processor is utilizing same solution as well, so less work to switch.
We don’t typically comment in detail on individual cases, but we do think it’s important for onlookers to know that we take every single case like this seriously. It looks like what happened here was an edge case involving SEPA payments that resulted in a dispute rate that’s far in excess of what’s generally permitted by financial partners. When we do this, our interventions are partly to protect financial partners/Stripe, partly to protect end customers, and in part to protect the businesses themselves. (For example, Visa will fine businesses that maintain high dispute rates.) This case is actually a bit more complicated still, since you said that you’re using Connect. In these cases, we also take seriously the importance of defending the platform (i.e. you) against users who are trying to defraud you.
More broadly, we work hard to balance the rules of the financial ecosystem, ease of use, protection against fraudulent businesses, consumer protection, and continuity for businesses. We support millions of businesses across dozens of countries and payment methods, and we discover new scenarios every day. We plan to blog about our work here in more detail before too long (including some of our key metrics). If any HNers have suggestions as to what we should include, feel free to reply here. We’ll try to share anything helpful that’s not too sensitive.