TIFU by using Stripe as a payment processor for my small business
So this seems like a good time to tell my Stripe story. Let me preface this by saying I attempted to move to a different card processor late last year&#x2F;early this year and despite 100+ hours of coding to fully integrate with them (and add features that were missing compared to our Stripe integration) I had to drop them due to what can only be described as lies about their rates (yes, I should have gotten this in writing instead of just over the phone but I was naive). All that said I had &lt;1 week to switch back to Stripe before preorders started for the event and it was a breeze. Stripe has it&#x27;s problems but I still think they are the best game in town.<p>Now for my Stripe issue. Around the time I dropped the other payment processor I bought some Stripe M2 readers (Part of &quot;Stripe Terminal&quot; for in-person payments). At the same time I purchased a &quot;Stripe Terminal Test Card&quot; to use in the test environment. They have a simulated reader but I always prefer to use the same hardware as production to get a better feel for how it all works.<p>The readers arrived and so did the card but for some reason I could not get the card to read, I kept getting back an error code of &quot;6&quot; [0] telling me that the card could not be read. If I scanned a real card it would scan and then fail when trying to auth the payment (understandable, I was in the &quot;test&quot; environment) but to me this proved the reader was working. I did some testing in &quot;live&quot; and all my cards were read&#x2F;charged without issue. I opened a ticket with Stripe on May 6th.<p>I had a similar &quot;new rep every message&quot; as the person in this Reddit post and my ticket would often go days&#x2F;weeks without response (other than me begging for help). I followed every single instruction they sent, I provided all the debug info they asked for, I shot 4+ videos of the issue, nothing. Around June 2nd (almost a month after starting this process) I complained on Twitter and Stripe Support reached out (this did nothing, it might have gotten me a useless reply on the ticket but no real help). A Stripe employee also reached out directly to me via DM and we started an email conversation resulting in them just sending me 5 Stripe Test Cards to see if maybe it was just my card that was broken. About the same time Stripe sent another M2 reader and another Test Card (Note: in the interim I bought 16 readers for my event and had tried multiple of them to no avail, I was pretty sure it wasn&#x27;t a problem with the reader and told them as much).<p>I got all the new hardware and recorded a long video of me testing 3 M2 readers and 5 Stripe Test cards in every combination 3 (readers) x 5 (cards) x 2 (methods, dip&#x2F;tap). I used their sample app and their sample backend (a ruby app running in a docker container) just to rule out any of my code. Same error every single time.<p>I reported my results to both the employee and my support ticket and got no help. Support didn&#x27;t reply, the employee talked about sending me card they had on their desk that they knew worked but that conversation petered out and I didn&#x27;t want to bug someone who was going out of their way to help me. 10+ days would go by and I&#x27;d beg and plead for help in my support ticket with no reply, this repeated multiple times.<p>Finally, on July 25th, 3 days ago, almost 3 months after starting this journey, Stripe replied to my ticket:<p>&gt; We have figured out that some of our Terminal physical test card inventory did not work.<p>No. Fucking. Shit. This is something I suggested about a million times. All my cards had the same serial&#x2F;batch&#x2F;something number on the back and I had speculated it could be a bad batch and asked them to send me an opened&#x2F;used card that they knew worked and&#x2F;or check the number on a working card, they ignored all of this.<p>They sent me 3 replacement cards and they sit next to me right now on my desk, unopened. My event is in 2 days and I don&#x27;t have the time&#x2F;energy to test them right now. All my energy is on testing the full setup on production but I might lose my mind if these are broken as well. My curiosity just got the better of me and I opened a card and the numbers on the back are different so that gives me some hope (all 7 cards I got from Support&#x2F;buying myself had the same number).<p>This is only 1 instance of shitty Stripe support, I have 2 others that I won&#x27;t get into right now. I still love their docs&#x2F;sdk&#x2F;dashboard but I really wish their support was better.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stripe.dev&#x2F;stripe-terminal-ios&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Enums&#x2F;SCPReaderDisplayMessage.html#&#x2F;c:@E@SCPReaderDisplayMessage@SCPReaderDisplayMessageTryAnotherReadMethod" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stripe.dev&#x2F;stripe-terminal-ios&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Enums&#x2F;SCPReaderD...</a>