We're having the same issues at marketplacer.com. We've had about 500 transactions fail in the past 24 hours due to this bug. There's been a lot of panicking here, but not much we have been able to do about it.
Thank you muchly for your post, Hugh. On Tuesday, 2 June 2015 11:27:02 UTC+10, Hugh Stephens wrote: > > Hi guys > > *Warning: long post. tl;dr, thanks to the guys at Pin for helping us out, > would recommend them, haven't had a great experience with Stripe.* > > Just wanted to throw some kudos a few ways, and vent on some others. Some > of you have probably (like us) been affected by NAB Transact's disastrous > problems, culminating in all non-AUD transactions to stop going through > over the last day or so (after rolling outages). This has affected Stripe, > Braintree and Pin (at least). > > Stripe's support has been pretty useless throughout. No error messages on > their status page, no email to customers, nothing. Their AUD payments have > been going through (as have Pin's – think Braintree maybe not?), so I get > that many customers might not be affected, but we transact ~85% in non-AUD > (USD and EUR predominantly, some GBP). They finally put up a notice 16 > hours down the track in their UI, and back-filled their status page to > "partial degradation" for the last few days (was all green-green until now). > > Finally managed to get onto Susan from Stripe (AU country manager) this > morning after a nightmare of customers last night complaining (rightfully) > that their payments were busted after calling their bank etc (NB: we also > had no registrations in non-AUD during this time...). This was only after > sending a whole series of angry as hell tweets, and knowing that she was > the country manager - the @stripe account generally doesn't do a lot of > customer service it seems. She was very apologetic for them dropping the > ball on the issue re keeping customers updated, and have been helpful in > trying to get us up and running through a USD-native account that we can > use as escrow while they fix the problem (rerouting all non-AUD through > another bank). (update: apparently they have put a workaround in place, > haven't tested it yet but some are going through). > > I've generally had pretty poor support experiences with Stripe (which is > email-only, if that, little to no prioritisation) – slow or nonexistent > response times to issues like customers being charged when Stripe says it > failed (when the customer is *definitely* charged – I've seen statements > etc). Has happened to us a couple of times now, resulting in a couple of > lost customers (and having to just ask them to chargeback us because of > Stripe as we can't refund a "failed" transaction) and a whole lot of > hand-wringing. > > BUT in good news (this is the kudos), the guys at Pin came to our rescue. > > They've apparently been doing the same things as Stripe (rerouting etc), > and have managed to move us to their new infrastructure immediately so we > could just change our default gateway in our billing platform and charge in > non-AUD. Apparently they're now able to support (or soon will be) some of > the reasons that we churned to Stripe for in the first place (like settling > into a US bank account for USD), and the support has been excellent > (disclaimer: I do know one of their team personally). > > So a big A+ to me for another Australian business, and I would strongly > encourage anyone considering what gateway they should use to look at Pin – > at least from my perspective, it seems they can compete like-for-like with > Stripe (albeit without subscriptions included free which is a bummer, but I > use Chargebee for that anyway). As we have used Pin for a few customers > previously, I'm already subscribed to their outage notices which are very > timely (bordering on too timely, which is OK with me). > > From the point of view of this list, I come from a comms background and > our platform does have outages, so I wanted to share my principles for > crisis comms. Outages and issues happen, and the value is often more in how > you respond to it than just fixing the issue as quickly as you can. > > 1. ADMIT: Always admit fault, and acknowledge the problem *in public*. > Don't just tell people to DM you etc without actually acknowledging you've > dropped the ball. Looks bad to anyone external. > 2. EXPLAIN: Tell the customer what the cause is (if you can) in plain > English, rather than relying on the "black box" approach and assuming it's > too hard/complex/boring for them (I will even put 'headings' saying > "Explanation below, tl;dr <x>" in an email) > 3. COMMUNICATE: Your communications should: acknowledge the issue, explain > what it is, give a timeline for resolution, tell the customer what you are > *doing* to solve their problem, and tell them when you will get in touch > next > 4. FOLLOW UP: Follow up regularly – for example, we will send an update > each hour if something is extended to customers, even if saying > "unfortunately this is still persisting, we will get back to you with an > update when available" > > From my experience, customers respond really well to this, particularly if > they haven't prompted the response initially – we can obviously identify > with a DB lookup customers affected by outages, and will chuck notices in > our UI even if only for 30 minutes. I've been consistently surprised how > many customers tell us that it's refreshing for a service to approach it > like this. > > Note that above doesn't include "give them a discount" – we do that when > someone has clearly lost some major jujubeans, but that actually doesn't > solve the problem for many customers - they just want to know it will be > fixed and won't happen again, rather than death by a thousand small > discounts as 'payment' for frequent outages. > > Thanks to the guys at Pin for helping us out again. > > Hugh > -- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Silicon Beach Australia mailing list. Vist http://siliconbeachaustralia.org for more Forum rules 1) No lurkers! It is expected that you introduce yourself. 2) No jobs postings. You can use http://siliconbeachaustralia.org/jobs To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/silicon-beach-australia?hl=en?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Silicon Beach Australia" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
