For many years, I was Paypal's biggest fan.
In the last two years though. things have changed.
They took away the refunding of fees when we had to issue a refund.
Raised rates.
Took away my 1.5% cash back and changed it to 1% without telling me.
By the way, I spend about 100k a month on that debit card and it was grandfathered in at the original 1.5% for the life of the account.
When I called them out on it, they insisted it will be 1% here on, and gave me the other .5% they owed me for the time period up to when I alerted them.
I now have the Capital one spark card at 2% cash back, so I fixed that problem.

Now, yesterday I get an email saying they may hold some funds when I go over $85,000 of sales in a month. They should be aware that I reach that before the mid month on a decent month.
Well I see in my account now they have some funds on hold - for 21 days!!!
It seems like they want tracking numbers for my orders or something. Basically they want proof that I am filling my orders, when this never came up before.

In the 10+ years I have been with Paypal, I have processed about fifteen million dollars with maybe 25 chargebacks over that span of time.
I have not had a dispute or chargeback in about a year now.
I called Paypal yesterday and the rep just said, well I see the message too, but I can't be sure if they will hold some of your money or not... She could not tell me what prompted this at all.
Has anyone else seen this with Paypal in the last few days?
I guess I will need to see if there is an API for updating Paypal with tracking info.
Either that, or move to another processor. It's just incredible that they would run off a customer who does a fair amount of processing with little to no issues or disputes.

I guess tomorrow I will be back on the phone with them to try to understand what's prompted this suddenly and what they expect from me.
Perhaps ship station has a way to update Paypal with tracking info.

Anyway, thanks for reading my rant. I am open to suggestions for processing or solving this issue.
David

Hi Dave

One of my clients used to process the majority of his online sales via PayPal through his own websites & their eBay store. They retail ecigs & vaping products & their main online store using ECT since 2016/17 had taken well in excess of £2.7 million at the time.

Their eBay store was taking orders hand over fist so much so he employed 4 people just to process, pack & ship the orders. Apart from a Monday, on an average weekday there would be about seven to ten Royal Mail sacks packed to the brim & when full those sacks would sit about 3 feet in height. Mondays would result in 50+ sacks of weekend orders, it was manic!

Then one day in late January this year, BUMP! zero orders from eBay & very few from his online store. His business partner stated they have an email from PayPal stating 'PayPal don’t believe that vaping products are safe, and PayPal suggest there is not enough scientific evidence behind ecigs/vaping products & so their account has been frozen with funds in excess of £40K frozen for upto six months.'

PayPal gave zero advance warning, not open to any kind of negaotiation, take it or leave it but we have your money frozen for initially six months & we reserve the right to extend that at our discretion. PayPals answer was a prepared stock answer via email 'Under PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy, PayPal may not be used for the sale of e-cigarettes, including e-liquids containing Nicotine, without pre-approval. Unfortunately, we are unable to offer pre-approval for you at this time; this is due to complex legal and payment industry requirements related to e-cigarettes.'

Total & utter fabricated tosh from PayPal. Worldpay, Sage & most, if not all, of the other processors process payments without issue for vaping products.

As their vaping supplies business have always had a Worldpay account their street shops sales haven't been blitzed to oblivion, their website sales are doing well but their eBay is 100% extinct. So to replace the lost Ebay income they now retail flower seeds & those sales are superior to the vaping stuff, but they were still awaiting their money from PayPal last time I saw my mate in June. How long before flower seeds become a threat to human health / violate PayPals spurious ploicies, ONLY PayPal can determine that one!

Actions like that speak volumes to myself & whilst these instances are rare, it totally stinks.

I've stated previously that I don't use PayPal, & never will. I survive without it & that's 100% fine by me. PayPal are Judge, Jury & Executioner & don't care who they ride roughshod over or ruin.

I'll stick with using Stripe @ 1.4% + 0.20p which, for every £500.00 processed, is £10 less than PayPal charges. I also use SquareUp but mainly process payments via the card reader/app & the occasional virtual terminal for card holder not present - CNP - transactions which are only 2.5%. Never had an issue - so far, fingers crossed

Steve
Bolton Lancashire

Thanks for the reply Steve.
The strange thing here is, I sell trophies and awards, hardly a public threat.
I am thinking this is some kind of new policy. In my paypal account, when I click the funds on hold, I see a list a transactions and you can click a button that says "get your money" and it walks you through a ridiculous number of steps to say it's a product and here is the tracking number. But even then, it says they will release the funds when the package shows delivered.

They say each month they will hold all funds in excess of 85,000.00
Well if I do 85k in the first 10 days of the month, and let's say after payroll and all expenses, I have 10k left.
How am I supposed to operate my business the last 20 days of the month with 10k?
Now I do have quite a bit of cash on hand, but that is none of Paypal's business. They are choking my funds and I won't have it. Not when I have a near perfect 10+ year history, with millions processed.

It's early here right now, but in a bit, I will be on the phone with them with one foot out the door.
I looked and ship station does have an API for Paypal, but it's not capable of updating tracking info.
There is no way I can update all orders with tracking info in Paypal manually. Even then though, they say they will hold funds until the shipment shows delivered.

Thanks,
David

Reading through this I really, really get the idea this will turn out to be some kind of mistake on PayPal's part. At some point you will get through to the second line of support and they'll sort it out. Sorry you have to go through all this though.

Vince

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I was just on a long call with them, even a supervisor.
They have not rolled this out widespread it seems. The supervisor says there is a "code" saying they need more info about my business, but we does not know what that is, or why...
She is escalating this to some group for an explanation, but that may take a while.
Meanwhile all day long they are holding more and more $$$ for 21 days, or until I add tracking and then once they see each orders is delivered, they will release funds.

It's as if my account is suddenly listed as a new account.

I have put in request to stripe and square to contact me.
Which one of those works like Paypal payments pro, meaning the customers stays on the website to complete the transaction?

David

For this exact reason that is why I dumped paypal years ago.

They approved my product I was selling (nothing illegal or banned) and everything was hunky dory.

Then a few years later they closed down my account, held my money until I "removed" all the "banned" items. No warning or anything.

I contacted them and the guy said I was selling banned items.

This was "one" persons opinion that did not like what I was selling. Remember... they approved the items beforehand.

I will never do anything with them again.

Since then I use my local bank with no problems and the rates are even better.

Patrick

Hi Dave,

PayPal have become very very greedy the last few years so we have diversified and have set-up a few payment options, Braintree, Square and PayPal. We had to drop Amazon Pay due to the ECT integration becoming obsolete and no longer supported by Amazon.

Square and Stripe seem to have very similar terms but Stripe has recently added support for Klarna which gives them an edge. Rather than choosing or switching I would go for both and give customers the choice of payment processor. You can go here https://jianlondon.co.uk and add something to the cart and go through the checkout process, then abandon it, to see how we present the choice of payment processors. I will simply add Stripe to the list. It does seem that the first position of payment provider becomes the default so you can adjust this as you require or prefer.

I will also be adding Stripe to our choice of payment processors and will ask Vince to add Klarna to the Stripe integration. Klarna appears to have an extensive selling channel for directing traffic to your website and are rolling out advertisement options including Adwords. This is very very powerful tool since it will bring together both the start and end of the selling journey closing the sales loop and could become one of the most efficient ways of selling online.

Cheers,

John

Thanks John.
Paypal did raise my hold limit, so it's not as pressing, but over the last few years, they took away many things that made them special.
I did get setup with Square. I had to go through an extra verification process with them to avoid holds on our processing volume.
So at any moment, I can flip the switch.

Thanks,
David