Thanks for the feedback! It depends on if they make a sale, but we run a daily payout system currently on PB. We've not had any concerns from sellers regarding this, some prefer USDC because it is more stable than holding their own currency.
Worth a shot if anyone can help me out / is facing the same problem.
I'm a US non-resident (from the UK) who registered a business via Stripe Atlas, and used Earth Class Mail (a Stripe Atlas partner) to setup and incorporate my company when I signed up to Stripe Atlas.
Due to the nature of my business, a large majority of payments are micro-transactions, so I spoke with a Stripe employee who kindly enabled micro-transaction pricing on my account.
Fast-forward to a few months ago, and I decide to offer a subscription service for my business at a higher price point. I was advised by a Stripe employee to set up a new Stripe account for these higher priced transactions as micro-transaction pricing wouldn't make sense, so I registered a new US Stripe account using the exact same business details as my Stripe Atlas account (using my Earth Class Mail address, EIN, etc.)
My original US Stripe Atlas account seems to have passed this new US verification fine - whereas my new US Stripe account is threatened to have payouts/payments disabled on March 12th unless I provide a physical US address, as it doesn't like the Earth Class Mail one.
I have contacted Stripe customer support who have not been helpful - if there's anyone at Stripe who can help me with this I would hugely, hugely appreciate some help.
I am in a similar situation than you, after spending quite a bit of time on this, I think there are 2 possible solution:
* The slightly hacky one: Find a virtual office in the U.S. whose address isn't flagged by Stripe + get a virtual U.S. phone number
* The proper solution: You need to transition to a UK Stripe account and provide your UK address/phone number. Even though your business is incorporated in the US what seem to matter is where you effectively do business. As long as you can provide a proof you are effectively doing business from the UK, Stripe will not have any issue with getting you a UK based Stripe account for US based corp.
This is all very weird, especially as you said, Stripe Atlas specifically encourages you go the registered agents route, only to then have the rug pulled from under your feet.
I've been banging my head against a wall the past few days trying to work out a solution to this. I've yet to make a decision, but my discoveries / theories so far:
- Stripe Atlas accounts are treated separately to regular US Stripe accounts at the moment when it comes to address verification. My Stripe Atlas account has passed this verification fine because of this difference (maybe because Stripe auto-uses the Delaware registered agent I paid for during Stripe Atlas setup as physical address?), but a regular Stripe US account using the same Earth Class Mail address fails verification. Stripe support says this: 'The address given to you on your Stripe Atlas account will be valid as it is provided by our partner, but then for normal Stripe account, one requirement is to have a physical business address.'
- I'm wondering if the Earth Class Mail address for my Regular Stripe US account is failing specifically because it has the words 'PMB XXXX' (private mailbox) in the first line of the address. This address was given to me at random by Earth Class Mail when I created my Stripe Atlas account, and I didn't really think anything of it - but I can see how 'PMB' is an instant red-flag for not being a physical location. The exact error message I get is: 'Invalid address. Your business address must be a valid physical address from which you conduct business and cannot be a private mailbox'.
- Also stumbled across the virtual office solution. Instead of PMB's they have 'suite numbers' in an actual building. I agree it also feels hacky, and likely to come under the same verification issues, but might a short term fix for my PMB issue. A lot of the services I contacted seem a bit shady though. I even emailed one of Stripe's partners (usestable.com) with a specific question regarding if their virtual addresses still work with Stripe, and have so far got no response.
- Co-working spaces like WeWork and Regus offer a virtual office service, which seem a bit more legitimate than some of the specific virtual office services I've seen, but come with a higher price-point.
I will probably try a cheap virtual office solution first, then move onto the co-working solution if that fails. I want to try and avoid switching Stripe accounts if possible as I think it's going to cause a lot of pain with migrating subscriptions etc.
The meta-issue here is the quality of Stripe support. I have paid so much to Stripe in transaction fees, but when a problem like this threatens to shut down an account I operate, all I get from them is vague answers, pointing to documentation, and 'computer says no' responses from people who have no idea what they're talking about.
I am facing this issue where I received an Earth Class Mail PMB XXXXX address when setting up my Stripe Atlas account and registering my business (I am a US non-resident), and now my account is being threatened to be shut down in 14 days if I don't get a new address. Is this a problem with Earth Class Mail addresses all being P.O box / virtual addresses? Or have I just gotten unlucky with the address I was dealt?
I was on Stripe Radar's free trial, but it wasn't as effective as I liked - it also turned out to be very pricey paying £0.04/screened transaction.
I've now rolled my own combination of IP-based bans on creating checkout links + notifications if a purchase has many failed attempts using diff cards (you can do this for free through Stripe's API). I refund suspected fraudulent transactions religiously without question as the $20 dispute fee is crippling, and have systems that will auto-generate and submit evidence to banks whenever I receive a dispute. I wish Stripe would do more to help!
Out of interest, how effective do you find challenging the chargebacks is in practice?
I always thought about automating this (or for lost delivery claims with shipping companies) but the numbers never worked out for it to be worth it because the success rate seemed like it would be so low.
I've only trialled this system recently, but my current results are:
1 Win
2 Partial Wins (basically a loss with how much you get back)
3 Losses
All these payments were fraudulent (a user doing credit card testing) and disputed by foreign banks (Thailand, Malaysia, Brazil). I think these cases are much harder to win, because the actual card holder is technically in the right to request the money back on their stolen card for a transaction they didn't do.
Much better than my previous results of just accepting each dispute though :)
Thanks. Are your charges much more than the chargeback processing fee?
One of the issues for us was that while the chargeback processing fee was ~£20, the order values were only ~£100-300, so even in the worst case of ~£320 lost, multiplied by roughly 1 in 10 non-fraud mistaken chargebacks, and 50% win rate, the value is only £16. At that amount it would take a lot to recoup the development costs. These are all very rough numbers, but illustrative I think.
Much less - 99% of our transactions are < $20, so every time we get hit with a dispute it's already an instant loss in terms of the dispute fee cancelling out any revenue gained back from winning the dispute.
It would be awesome to hear/see more about the system you built to auto-generate and submit evidence. This is a huge pain for many companies which an open source tool could solve.
Sure! I basically use PDF Lib to generate a letter with all my evidence bundled into one pdf file. It sucks up data from my database about the user's activity. Format is the following:
Formal 1 page letter with company logo - "Dear Sir/Madam.. writing about $9.99 dispute for card XXXX on X date for user [NAME]" (all this is pulled from the Stripe API).
I then have 5 appendixes on separate pages:
Appendix 1: Users' receipt (just a pic of the Stripe receipt)
Appendix 2: User's order history (just printed, name of items, price, and timestamp)
Appendix 3: Screenshot of the user's purchases page clearly showing the item
Appendix 4: Email confirmations - I store copies of each HTML email sent, so just take a picture of this.
Appendix 5: Site activity with IP addresses and timestamps. This is all user actions on my site (viewing items, purchasing, etc.)
I created it because I had 20 disputes piling up, and I was dreading processing them all. Given that you're likely to lose the majority of disputes, it's super discouraging to put in the work, but this makes it a bit easier (I don't want to let fraudsters just get away with it!).
I just used GPT-4 to help build an analytics dashboard using ChartJS. There's so many settings in ChartJS, it would have taken me a week to StackOverflow / Google how to get my charts how I'd like them - it took me a day with GPT-4. I could just ask it anything and it would help no problem. Any buggy code it produced, I'd just copy and paste the error message and it would provide a fix.
What interface are you using? I've so far only used ChatGPT through the web interface. (I pay for plus). I just ask it for things that are standalone snippet-like things. Perfect functions on the standard library, or an emacs lisp snippet for converting a unix epoch to an ISO timestamp. I'm not sure I could allow it to read my company's code, but is that what you're doing when you're using as part of a large project like that?
Imo the chartjs docs are not very good. Or i'm just used to rust's docs.rs, where the whole api surface is documented. I couldn't find something like this for chartjs.
I just started looking at the docs a couple minutes ago to understand why the OP claims that it would have taken a week to accomplish something with this library. I don't get it.
How is it possible that any task could take a week or more with this library? It looks extremely straightforward and the documentation contains lots of examples.
Not sure what your background is, but in my experience, some tinkering takes ages.
Some tasks you deem to be a lot of work are relatively fast in the end.
And some tasks produce errors that send you on a journey for hours.
Straight forward looks and good docs may not help here.
I really miss firebase function logs. Even though it was a bit glitchy at times, it was the perfect simplified overview of everything on my backend, and fitted well with the simple UI of firebase. I'm sure I'll get used to Google Cloud logs - but it just feels really out of place now.
Also noticing this - very hard to find software engineers in the UK right now. Apparently we have a major skill shortage[1] - which I'm not surprised by, given how little CS/coding was pushed in schools 5-10 years ago.
How is it that Silicon Valley is in America, when we have so many net-savvy tech-heads here. They may have the silicon chip, but we have the silicon chap, and of course, chapesses
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