Stripe cracks down on scammers but mistakenly freezes out innocent users

Stripe is in the news a lot, especially in the form of speculation about a potential IPO. But a tender offer announced at the end of February gave employees a liquidity opportunity, and may signal that the IPO is still some ways off. The company continues expanding its offerings beyond its core payment processing service and is gradually re-growing its valuation, which now stands at $65 billion, having been cut to $50 billion in 2023 from a previous high of $95 billion.

So, let’s all take a deep breath, put the IPO out of our minds for the moment… and dig into some of their customer feedback.

Stripe’s wealth of multi-modal customer feedback

At Enterpret, we are in the business of customer feedback, and sometimes we like to play around with public data to see what we can learn. Stripe has a wealth of public customer feedback online through app store reviews and social media posts. We started by ingesting data from five sources – Twitter, Reddit, Google Play Store, Apple App Store, and G2.

Enterpret has direct integrations with these sources, so it’s simple. Many of our customers value the ease with which they can analyze data from their various sources, using our straightforward analytical tools to get a deeper perspective on customer outcomes.

Insights in a snap with Wisdom - the AI Copilot for customer insights

To understand what Stripe customer are saying, we started digging in with Wisdom, our AI Copilot for customer insights. Wisdom is the fastest way to surface insights in Stripe's public feedback set without any knowledge about the themes or topics Stripe customers care about most.

There's is a lot of positive feedback for Stripe. Stripe has been transformative for businesss big and small. Customers love the usefulness of the platform, the superior design quality, and the Stripe team.

On the flip side, we wanted to see what might not be clicking at Stripe. So, we asked Wisdom to "Please summarize the top issues that customers are complaining about."

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This is the summary Wisdom generated - which I was able to copy and paste the full summary with one click. (Annotations have been removed for easy scanning)
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Stripe customers are experiencing a range of issues, from account handling and customer support problems to unexpected refunds and unauthorized transactions. These issues are causing significant financial and operational disruptions, leading to a loss of trust in the service.

• Account Handling and Customer Support Issues: Users have reported an Issue With Account Suspension(2220 Records), with their accounts being closed and funds withheld for extended periods They have also expressed dissatisfaction with the lack of transparency and poor customer support in these situations‍. Additionally, users have reported an Issue With Funds Holding(2167 Records), with Stripe's platform being accused of automatically putting accounts at high risk and withholding funds without clear reasons.
• Financial Disruptions: Users have reported an Issue With Payout Delays(338 Records), with some users experiencing delays in receiving their payouts, leading to financial strain They have also reported an Issue With Unexpected Refunds(140 Records), with their accounts being frozen and significant business information being requested, leading to the inability to refund their clients.
• Unauthorized Transactions and Trust Issues: Users have reported an Issue With Unauthorized Money Transactions(136 Records), expressing frustration and concern about their accounts being at risk of being closed and their money being taken‍. These issues have led to a significant Issue With Trust In Service(108 Records), with users expressing strong dissatisfaction and a lack of trust in Stripe's business practices and customer service.

Digging in deeper: G2 ratings vs App Ratings

We wanted understand other ways customers feel about Stripe by looking at feedback from different sources. In Enterpret, it’s easy to segment G2 and App Store Ratings and see how different apps perform overall and over time. Here are a few examples:

Average G2 Ratings of several of Stripe’s products

Average ratings over time for Android and iOS Dashboard apps

The trend shows that the Stripe Android Play Store App consistently outperforms the iOS App Store ratings. (We love to see a company that give their Android Apps love!)

Uncovering “locked accounts” and “frozen funds” dominate public feedback

Typically, when we do these public data exercises, we find a variety of interesting angles to explore – this bug or that usability issue.

With Stripe, one area of feedback completely dominated: locked accounts, frozen funds, and the challenge of getting help to resolve those issues.

Looking at the source breakdown, we can see this trend was mostly driven by Twitter. Digging in further reveals a couple of viral threads in which one prominent user fell afoul of Stripe’s account controls, and their followers piled on in the replies.

It’s a bit difficult to figure out which of these complaints are from innocent users wrongly caught by some automated trigger and which are scammers grumpy about the penalties for violating terms of service signed but never read. You might raise an eyebrow when you see a user (who openly identifies as a drop-shipper in their bio) complaining about unfair account moderation. And it’s easy to be skeptical about users who complain about their legitimate enterprises but refuse to give more detail than they are “in the packaging business.”

Separating the Stripe scammers from the innocent

Enterpret makes it easy to filter large volumes of data based on specific metadata or keywords. In the case of Stripe, this can be helpful when trying to identify real users impacted based on keywords, looking at the feedback by source, or anomaly reports.

Here are some of the more convincing cases we surfaced:

But one thing is certain: Stripe’s customer support is overwhelmed by all of the requests, and it’s very hard for users, legitimate or not, to get in touch with someone who can help.

Companies that handle payments operate in a strict regulatory environment, so it’s understandable. But mistakes happen—Venmo once held my friend’s payment for our dinner outing for a week because she wrote “Syrian” in the memo.

Organizations like Stripe can benefit from having a feedback infrastructure to sort out issues for people who didn’t violate rules. Enterpret is helping some of the best product companies optimize customer experiences with feedback. See how we’re helping:

• Notion leveraging machine learning to identify feedback reasons and surface unknowns
• Apollo.io maps feedback to revenue to focus on the 20% of the highest-impact issues
• Canva builds products that delight over 170 million users.

If you’re a team (or someone at Stripe) that wants to discuss how Enterpret can help you make the most of your customer feedback, get in touch!