Many moons ago we had our account with Stripe abruptly closed because one of the services we offered was related to the marijuana business. While we thought of ourselves as a regulatory compliance inventory control solution, they did not. It’s a violation of their TOS.
This came at a pretty critical time of growth for our up-start company. It took us a few weeks to find another vendor who was happy to receive thousands of dollars from us in processing fees.
Since then other businesses have come on-line to compete with our offering, great for the consumer and great for the industry. It’s growing rapidly and many of the projections show this kind of growth for at least the next three years. We are one of the more mature offerings in this young space and have built collaborative relationships with some of these businesses.
Imagine our surprise to find out that some of them are using Stripe! And Stripe knows that these businesses are engaged in the marijuana trade! It’s in our names, it’s advertised loudly on our respective home-pages, Stripe claims they review businesses using their platforms for compliance.
Our last posting on the Stripe incident attracted a response from Patrick, we emailed him for clarity on the subject. We only received a response from their generic Support account where they stated they couldn’t comment about other accounts. Fair enough.
What’s really aggravating however is that, while we were booted at least two of these other businesses are allowed to continue to operate using Stripe.
It’s a suspect situation when a company with the wide reach of Stripe chooses selective enforcement of the rules they claim to operate by. Maybe they could “re-accommodate” our marijuana business. (we asked, they declined).