r/payments

I run a pack ripping business and every time we have a strong week, it feels like Stripe suddenly wants to look at the account again. Nothing about the business changed, we just processed more orders than usual. It’s getting pretty frustrating because a good sales week should be a good thing, not something that makes me wonder if payouts are about to get delayed or another reserve is coming. Anyone else run into this once their volume started growing?

Hi everyone,

I’ve spent the past three years working in e-commerce, selling through both marketplaces and my own website. Dealing with payment providers firsthand is what got me interested in fintech, and I’m now trying to understand the payments industry more deeply.

For people who work in payments or run an online business: what is still frustrating, slow, expensive, or unnecessarily complicated about accepting payments?

I’m especially interested in the parts around getting a business set up with a provider, checkout and payment acceptance, payouts, disputes, or managing payments across different channels.

What do you currently do when this happens? Have existing providers solved it well, or do you still rely on workarounds?

I’m not promoting a product lol I’m trying to learn from people who deal with this firsthand. Thanks

Hey all,

We're building self-ordering kiosks (Electron app) and need to hook up payment terminals. The flow we want is simple: the kiosk sends an amount, the customer pays on the terminal, and we get back success or failure. We don't want to touch card data at all, so we're aiming for a semi-integrated setup where we just say "charge 120 SAR" and get a result.

Most of our clients are in Saudi Arabia, and many already have terminals they'd like to keep using. For anyone who's built something like this, I'd love to hear:

• Multi-brand support: How do you handle different terminal brands/providers, especially when clients want to keep their existing hardware?
• Standards: Is there a common protocol, or does every provider ship its own SDK/API?
• Existing tools: Are there libraries, middleware, or abstraction layers that already solve this, so we don't have to build an adapter for every vendor?
• Local connection: Can terminals usually be controlled locally over USB, Serial, or LAN? Anything to watch out for from Electron?
• Testing: How do you mock or simulate terminals during development?
• Saudi specifics: Since our clients are in Saudi Arabia, does that change anything about the implementation? For example, local regulations, required protocols, or certifications, or restrictions on which providers/terminals we can use.

Any experience, war stories, or recommendations would be really appreciated. Thanks!

We collect USD from US customers and pay a small dev team in India. Started on Stripe alone, got flagged twice for "unusual payout pattern" within 4 months, each time a 5 day freeze.

Current setup: Stripe for card payments, Lemon Squeezy for the subscription/billing side, and Unlimit for the business account that actually receives and holds the USD before we convert and pay contractors. Idea was that no single provider sees the full flow, card in, subscription logic, payout out.

It's worked for 7 months, no freezes, but I can't tell if that's the design or just quieter volume than before. Onboarding on the EMU side took about 4 days, which surprised me after the usual bank runaround.

Anyone running something similar long term, or is splitting providers just delaying the same review from happening somewhere else?

marketplace needing to pay sellers in us, canada, southeast asia and latam, b2b style payouts to registered sellers n small businesses, need kyb on sellers, multi currency payout n fast enough settlement sellers arent waiting 4 days per cycle

shortlist, cybrid is api first b2b payout infra with us and canada organisation, kyb built in, stablecoin settlement and global payout network, bridge is developer first stablecoin api under stripe, clean docs, strong for stripe ecosystem teams, conduit is latam focused b2b payment infra with deep local corridor relations, zero hash is digital asset infra with custody and settlement for fintechs

north america + latam + southeast asia footprint, how does this comparison shake out