Tell HN: DigitalRiver/MyCommerce stopped paying vendors since July
We're a small family company and the $20k MyCommerce owes us is a big deal.For those who don't know MyCommerce is a platform for selling software online. They're merchant of record, they handle taxes, generate license keys, etc so they're a bit higher level than Stripe or PayPal. We're with them since 2005. Things started going south in August. July payment was due on August 15 but never came. Few days afterwards they sent and email that they're changing contract terms and that payments will now be sent 60 days instead of 15 days after the month. Sadly, I didn't switch to another payment processor immediately that day - accountants were on holiday, we were investigating our options, and we were generally happy for 20 years with them. We switched only in September, where they worsened contract terms even more, introducing monthly fee, hourly fee for support, increased payment thresholds, etc. By the time we switched, MyCommerce already sat on entire revenue from July, August, and half of September. Their support is not helpful.This is not only about us, it's about myriad other vendors, mostly small ones. Unfortunately, we didn't have online space to share our findings and experiences. I only found today that it was discussed on kvraudio forum, and a bit on LinkedIn. There are many small vendors who are now in a hole for tens of thousands of dollars/euros.It looks pretty much that MyCommerce / DigitarRiver Gmbh are in financial trouble. There are news of layoffs and new management. It's questionable whether we'll see any of our money and when. But the troubling part is MyCommerce still operates and takes orders. If there are vendors who still only know about what MyCommerce officially told them and wait for delayed payments - please reconsider your position.https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=612462https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=614929&start=...https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lorant-barla_mycommerce-digit...
136 points by grujicd - 34 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41856330
Some more horror stories from merchants in the comments there.
Digital River runs dry, hasn't paid developers for sales since July - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41856330 - Oct 2024 (17 comments)
Layoff reports: https://www.thelayoff.com/digital-river
Public UK gov records filled by Digital River UK, including 51 page contract between all Digital River subsidiaries in all countries and Cerberus Business Finance Agency on 8 August: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...
Their new platform terms come into effect today, and they have absolutely buried the scale of their new monthly fee (US$100/month for me - unsure if it varies per customer). None of the emails mention the fee amounts. Customer support couldn't tell me the fee amounts. I checked the portal again today and the new contract finally has the new fees in it.
I setup a new merchant of record a few weeks ago, but that doesn't help the fact they're sitting on a few grand of my sales. My balance is above their new payout threshold (US$2500), but it wouldn't surprise me if they sit on the money and let the monthly fees eat into it until it's back below the threshold.
Thought I was doing the right thing by using a merchant of record to handle my international B2B sales since 2016. Apparently not. Fun times.
Stripe recently acquired Lemon Squeezy, another merchant of record, so maybe look into that. (Stripe Tax will help you collect the right amount of sales tax, but that's only half the problem. You still have to remit it to all the relevant jurisdictions.)
Other options are Paddle and FastSpring.
I believe this is what the theories of capitalism say would happen.
1 Ask customers if they agree to get refund&repay you to different merchant. Subtract 180 days from now for paypal orders (there is no deadline for CC? i could refund 1 year 2 months while testing) and start refunding orders after this date. We are losing ability to do this everyday, but we increase our refund rate by doing this so no hurry
2 Ask users w/ lawyers to fill class action lawsuit or at least to share their contacts/lawsuit+claim interest rate for unpaid amount https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=8979590#p8979...
3 subrogation: sell our accounts to lawyers
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/maja-te%C5%A1i%C4%87-8435509b...
Still, their cut is around 5-10%, depending on how much they dip on the exchange rate. That means they hoarded 10-20x of their usual profits for July, August and September from all the other vendors. I sure hope that they didn't spent all that or moved it to a parent company. But the fact that we're not hearing any official statements suggests otherwise.
Companies like this are usually run as a barely sustainable ponzi scheme. Any money they might have had is long gone. They're paying your September revenue with money from their October sales, and they plan to pay your October revenue with money from their November sales.
Then suddenly their sales take a big hit, perhaps because a big merchant left, or perhaps because of a general economic downturn. They still need to pay out their other merchants' October revenue, but their November sales are not enough to cover it. What happens is that they announce that from now on, payment terms will be net 60 instead of 15 or 30. This is the first big red flag. The plan is to wait for December sales. Maybe that will solve the problem in the short term. Maybe it won't, and if it doesn't, by January everyone is in deep shit.
That means they were at most taking a half of future month for "ponzi buffer". Couldn't be more than that, if we assume they were not accruing debt. Which they most probably did, but for the sake of high-level analysis we could assume they were at zero.
They're now all of a sudden sitting on a July, August, and in most cases good piece of September sales. They basically went from 15 days of "extra ponzi buffer" to 45 day. If we include July, which they also didn't pay - they're now sitting on 75 day of revenue. That's quite the extra money compared with extra buffer they were operating with until recently, depending on how we look - 5 times more.
We should also take into account that MyCommerce margin is between 5 and 10%, depending on order size and how much of currency exchange they take. So their operating expenses should be around that. Even if they lost some big clients and let's say lost half of the sales, their expenses should went from 10% to a 20% of a single month. But they're sitting on full 2.5 months of now, 25 times more than their typical expenses.
Something is way off, that can't be explained with gradual slip into ponzi scheme.
One explanation was that Kaspersky was so big for them, it made 90% of sales. When they left the platform, their operating expenses went from 10% to 100% (using napkin math, we're only guessing anyway).
However, since they had a huge layoff in July I assume they're adjusting their expenses to the loss of such a big client. Layoff in US was without severance, based on reports. Since they continued collecting money from other vendors, and not paying them, and considering that they accumulated multiple months of full revenue compared to the usual 5-10% of a single month they should still have MUCH more money at hand.
It's very likely that they're transferring that money to another entity. Perhaps paying off a big creditor, which might be legal, but they intentionally picked to pay off one single creditor with big legal team instead of hundreds (thousands?) small defenseless vendors. And they lied to these small vendors to make them stay a bit more and siphon some more money for that other party.
In essence, they told us to stay with them and bring them more sales which at that point they were already planning to send to another party. This very much looks like a fraud and theft.
When they take 100$ in revenue, 10$ of that is their money, 90$ is your money (even though they handle it), which they can't legally touch, no? Or is that only for regulated industries?
I, also, would not consider this a major hit. You had been sailing with them for 20 years. I've seen many more things break in a shorter time frame. Such is life.
Wonder if this company took on a shit ton of debt or PE and now the bill is due.
Edit: he clarified later that he's already in the process of cancellation and that's probably the reason he doesn't see contracts any more