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/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 <1 week to switch back to Stripe before preorders started for the event and it was a breeze. Stripe has it's problems but I still think they are the best game in town.

Now for my Stripe issue. Around the time I dropped the other payment processor I bought some Stripe M2 readers (Part of "Stripe Terminal" for in-person payments). At the same time I purchased a "Stripe Terminal Test Card" 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.

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 "6" [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 "test" environment) but to me this proved the reader was working. I did some testing in "live" and all my cards were read/charged without issue. I opened a ticket with Stripe on May 6th.

I had a similar "new rep every message" as the person in this Reddit post and my ticket would often go days/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't a problem with the reader and told them as much).

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/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.

I reported my results to both the employee and my support ticket and got no help. Support didn'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't want to bug someone who was going out of their way to help me. 10+ days would go by and I'd beg and plead for help in my support ticket with no reply, this repeated multiple times.

Finally, on July 25th, 3 days ago, almost 3 months after starting this journey, Stripe replied to my ticket:

> We have figured out that some of our Terminal physical test card inventory did not work.

No. Fucking. Shit. This is something I suggested about a million times. All my cards had the same serial/batch/something number on the back and I had speculated it could be a bad batch and asked them to send me an opened/used card that they knew worked and/or check the number on a working card, they ignored all of this.

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't have the time/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/buying myself had the same number).

This is only 1 instance of shitty Stripe support, I have 2 others that I won't get into right now. I still love their docs/sdk/dashboard but I really wish their support was better.

[0] https://stripe.dev/stripe-terminal-ios/docs/Enums/SCPReaderD...