Yeah, definitely. I’d love to hear more about the high volume site that they rejected, though, if you’re willing and able to share. I’m just curious what went on in the backend because, in my experience, Stripe is good about not being overly zealous in shutting down Connect accounts. We’ve had accounts rejected for fraud or TOS violations (and they clearly were), but my sense is that had Stripe closed any accounts incorrectly, we very much could have interceded in the merchants behalf and got things corrected.
On the KYC front, if there are difficulties, it’s usually just a matter of Stripe requiring a more rigorous form of verification (such as a copy of photo ID). We’ve never had a merchant to unable to completely KYC and lose their account. Of course, we operate at a much, much smaller scale than Shopify (and in a rather low risk vertical), so surely run into fewer problems and can handle them in a more personal manner.
I wonder, though, how much of this could be Shopify’s inability or unwillingness to handle these edge cases that come up with Connect accounts rather than any malice on their part.
Certainly pushing merchants to a Stripe Connect account and then not letting them go back to a regular Stripe is pretty bad, but, having been behind the scenes in a scenario ms like this, I could see how these could result from poor decision making and incomplete knowledge rather than malice. It’d be easy for someone to make the assumption that if a merchant as a stand-alone Stripe account, they’d obviously not run into any problems with a Connect accounts. Coupled with the fact that companies using Stripe Connect will tend to (not unreasonably) want to drive as much of the processing that happens on their platform into Stripe Connect, so that they can either begin to receiving volumes discounts on the processing or increase the discounts they already receive, which they can use to either make money on the processing or offer more competitive rates to their merchants.
* For reference, across all sites, we process about ~800k USD per year.
* We had been processing with Stripe (in our jurisdiction) for about 3 - 4 years.
* Shopify Payments was launched in our jurisdiction. We were excited by the idea of picking up an extra ~1.5% off transactions, and switched immediately.
* One week later, we were asked to submit KYC - which we did. One week after, we received the following:
"Unfortunately, Shopify Payments is currently only available to merchants and their companies that are based in and operating from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and the United States respectively. Upon review of your Shopify account, and the details that you have submitted, we will regrettably be unable to provide you with access to the Shopify Payments gateway for your site. "
* Our company is in the jurisdiction. Our warehouse is in the jurisdiction, our director is in the jurisdiction. We passed Stripe's KYC (which was a lot more involved).
* We sent 2 emails to support. They were never answered.
* I sent an email to the CTO and CEO, detailed, objective and balanced. No reply.
* The funds that they had taken were held for 180 days for "Chargeback Risk" - this was about 15k USD.
* They refused steadfastly to re-enable Stripe, effectively killing our shop.
* We reached out to Stripe, who could not / would not confirm specifics, confirmed that Shopify had the right to apply their own judgement to KYC, and that Stripe had no problems with our account.
* After pushing the issue further with Shopify via a different email, we got a reply:
"Shopify have chosen to use our Stripe Connect feature for Shopify payments, which allows them to manage customers Stripe accounts on their behalf. Rest assured that this will not put your business in any risk and it is very similar to having a typical Stripe account. If you'd like, you can read more on this product, here:
Shopify have recently removed the option to work directly with Stripe for users in certain countries. As they manage the types of integrations available on their system, we unfortunately cannot do anything to allow you to work directly with Stripe through Shopify as this is ultimately up to them to allow. "
* We emailed Stripe, who confirmed the situation, and said regrettably they had no control over it.
* We have reached out on multiple occasions to Shopify, requesting that they perform pre-compliance on our site / KYC - so we could "safely" migrate to Shopify Payments.
* We had one reply to multiple emails, which said: There is no risk migrating to Shopify Payments, and we cannot perform pre-migration compliance.
In the second situation, we had a competitor email abuse@shopify.com - claiming trademark infringement on a specific product. We were not informed of this notice - and Shopify nuked about 15 items on our site - completely unrelated to the claimant email.
* Via lawyers, we eventually got our hands on the complainant's email: There was no court order, no judgement, nothing - just an email saying: this is an infringing product.
* Shopify said we had 7 days to 'resolve the issue' before account closure, but also said that they 'would not enter into discussion on the subject'.
* Our lawyers had a signed document from the complainant confirming that there was no infringement - but this did nothing for the case.
In summary - the Shopify _platform_ is an incredible platform - but their business practices are shady, their customer support is abysmal, and the dark patterns seem to be worse and worse.
On the KYC front, if there are difficulties, it’s usually just a matter of Stripe requiring a more rigorous form of verification (such as a copy of photo ID). We’ve never had a merchant to unable to completely KYC and lose their account. Of course, we operate at a much, much smaller scale than Shopify (and in a rather low risk vertical), so surely run into fewer problems and can handle them in a more personal manner.
I wonder, though, how much of this could be Shopify’s inability or unwillingness to handle these edge cases that come up with Connect accounts rather than any malice on their part.
Certainly pushing merchants to a Stripe Connect account and then not letting them go back to a regular Stripe is pretty bad, but, having been behind the scenes in a scenario ms like this, I could see how these could result from poor decision making and incomplete knowledge rather than malice. It’d be easy for someone to make the assumption that if a merchant as a stand-alone Stripe account, they’d obviously not run into any problems with a Connect accounts. Coupled with the fact that companies using Stripe Connect will tend to (not unreasonably) want to drive as much of the processing that happens on their platform into Stripe Connect, so that they can either begin to receiving volumes discounts on the processing or increase the discounts they already receive, which they can use to either make money on the processing or offer more competitive rates to their merchants.