Welcome to Episode 43 of the Profitable Web Designer Podcast, where we’re committed to helping web designers to stop undercharging, overdelivering, overworking, overworking and create profitable, sustainable web design businesses.
I’m Shannon Mattern, your host and founder of the Web Designer Academy where we teach the business side of running a web design business, and if you wanna make a consistent, full-time income as a web designer but you’re struggling with things like pricing, boundaries, mindset and marketing and you’re EXHAUSTED from going it alone… well, my friend, you’re in the right place.
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This week I’m sharing my experience with Stripe and I was held liable for fraudulent charges they allowed on my account.
What happened:
- I woke up one morning to find that my Stripe account was being shut down for fraudulent activity that I couldn’t see and hadn’t received any payment notifications for, to the tune of $70,000.
- After going back and forth several times with their customer support, it became clear that they had no intent of helping me resolve the issue and were planning to refund the charges from my business account.
- I got the run around from several departments and it came down to disconnecting my bank account in order to protect my business from the fraudulent charges.
I also talk about how:
- The breach was blamed on me somehow exposing my secret API keys in source code when they aren’t even integrated on my website.
- I had to set up a merchant account through my bank instead of using a third party processor in order for my transactions to be protected from fraud.
- You can let a moment like this break you, or you can learn from it and help others along the way.
Ann Koppuzha: https://powerhouse-legal.com
PS - Grab my brand new training that breaks down the exact pricing strategy that the high-earning web designers inside our Web Designer Academy used to confidently charge five times more without having to work more or offer more services at https://webdesigneracademy.com/pricing.
