This going to be a rant post, where I will share all my experiences with using payment solutions for my websites, why they suck massive dick, and why crypto will be the future of all online payments.
I'm sick of all the stupid practices, ridiculous fees, shitty APIs, useless customer service reps, and just general bullshittery. I want to apologize in advance for the constant use of profanity in this post.
For those of you who have been following my posts, this will be first time you see me talk this much about my job and what I do for a living. I never got the chance to share about my personal businesses or sources of income and I'm sad to say that the very first time I do it will have to be such a negative one.
I've been operating online since 2013
I've run a number of different websites, and today I will use just one as an example, for statistics and email exchanges between me and the people we have to deal with whenever something happens.
You can imagine that I have been dealing with this shit for 4 years now, so I actually have much more to show besides this one incident/example, but it would make the post far too long.
For this case, I will share my numbers for 2 payment processors. Some of you might recognize them from the UI, but to those who are not familiar, they are PayPal and Stripe. Both are very popular and used widely.
So for this site, we transacted about $200,000 since the start of the year. I'm sharing these numbers with you because you need to understand that these companies give unequal treatment toward businesses that use their services
They make money from fees they take per transaction, and it's natural that they would be more supportive of bigger websites that transact hundreds of thousands every month (better rates, better customer support, etc). My website is considered a small business in their eyes, thus they don't care so much for the likes of us. If they were to lose us as a customer, they probably wouldn't lose much.The greed and stupidity is real
So here's a short list of what they do that really fucks with the people who use them for their services BECAUSE WE HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO USE THEM.
- Ridiculous fees, and stupid currency conversion practices. Imagine this, when I want to withdraw USD to my USD bank account, I can't do it in USD > USD. I'm actually forced to convert from USD > SGD > USD so they can rip us off with their currency conversion fee twice, because why the fuck not?
- Withholding a big portion of our funds even when we are transacting more than enough in terms of payment volume every single day, so they can tie us down and have some form of leverage over us in case anything happens. Isn't that wonderful? It's like blackmail, except it's actually legal!
- Banks don't enforce 2 step verification or 2FA for their customers even though it's the easiest solution to solving credit card fraud. I honestly have no clue why they don't do this. 2FA has been around for years, and we still don't use it? Why???? WHYYYY?!!!!!!!!!!1
- Absolutely useless customer support. That's right, customer support is literally a bunch of monkeys who are taught to reply templated answers and not actually help you with the problems you encounter. I'm not mad at the individual CS reps I encounter, even though I'm extremely frustrated after every interaction, phone or email.
But wait, here's where it gets ridiculous
Putting aside all the shitty support, and bad fees because we're not a big corporation, guess what else we need to deal with?
CHARGEBACKS, that's right. Fucking chargebacks and disputes.
What are chargebacks? Good question.
Chargebacks are when shitty people who buy something online decide that they no longer want to pay the money that they already paid for the item or service that they bought, so what do they do?
THE CUNT: "Boohoo, I lost my credit card, and someone bought some stuff on it, can you help me plz?"
THE BANK: "Oh, hello sir, thank you for your report, of course we'll go ahead and refund you immediately without doing any investigation because you are our customer"
And before anyone tells me that I should "just fight the disputes", do you think I haven't tried that already? I fight every single case, but 99% of the time the banks just rule in favour of their customer anyway, even after reviewing evidence.
"It's not our problem, so you go deal with it"
Check out this recent exchange I had with Stripe's customer support. I like how it's called "customer support", because they support us so well, right?
I'm FUCKING KIDDING, they don't do shit to help us, and they obviously don't give a flying fuck.
Check out the email exchange below, I'll do a TL;DR after every email for those who are lazy to read the full thing -
TL;DR - "I've reviewed your account and evidence submitted, although this is a case of obvious fraud, we'd like you to refund the customer so we can resolve this matter fast and save us all the fucking trouble. I'd also like to inform you that in the case that you do decide to fight the case, we'll be charging you additional "dispute fees", and we might need to terminate your account when your dispute rate goes too high."
My reply to them -
Their reply, and I didn't bother to reply after this. I'm so done.
TL;DR - "Thank you for sharing your concerns with us, we honestly couldn't care less since we're the big guy. We don't lose anything ourselves, except the fee for these transactions, and the bank doesn't lose anything either. Only you lose money, so you can go fuck yourself."
That's the end of it. This was over a case of $2,400. Like I mentioned earlier, I try to fight every case, but honestly chargebacks are a losing battle for businesses like mine. Banks are the ones in control, and most of them don't want to anger their customers so they just end up ruling in their favour all the time.