Shopify Payments Hostages clients: How not to roll out a product
Shopify Payments (Shopify proxying sales through its own Stripe accounts) recently rolled out world-wide. They make their money by leveraging volume rates.
We process on Stripe; moving to Shopify Payments and saving 1% seemed like a good idea.
The switch has been disastrous:
- Incorrect rates advertised. Shopify stated $2.35 HKD per transaction on one page, $2.35 USD on another, and 2.35EU on another page; Customer support spent weeks debating on what was correct. Advertising on their site, the shop, and app are still incorrect.
- In their haste/greed to onboard customers - Shopify performs no KYC and no due diligence before onboarding customers - but immediately processes payments.
- Two days later, we were informed that all payouts were suspended until KYC was performed. Thousands in revenue were used as hostage until we performed KYC
- We tried to switch back to Stripe - but it had been removed from our billing options. There was no way out - our funds and our store were hostaged. Shopify support did not reply to our request to transfer back to Stripe.
- Two days later, we were "approved", but informed that Shopify would hold 20% reserves for 3 months until we established our "Chargeback Record". Again - this was undocumented before the transition. There was no way to prove our current chargeback record on the same merchant and no way to leave Shopify Payments
I would love to think that this is an isolated case, but it happened across all our stores, which are all operated independently.
TLDR: Shopify Payments lures clients with simplicity and incorrect rates, allowing instance processing which they later ransom against KYC, hold 20% reserve for 3 months, refuse let you migrate away from their platform, and ignore emails about the subject.