PayPal Can Make Or Break Your Business

Now, I am not one to step in an bash companies for making mistakes as we all make them from time to time and for the most part, I really like PayPal. But…

I have recently been involved with a company that has had their PayPal account restricted without  warning.  When I mean restricted, PayPal is allowing money to go into the account, but won’t let them access it or pay bills out of it or have access to any of the money in the account and we are not talking about a few hundred dollars here but thousands.

Pretty jacked up I know. Now I had heard of things happening like this before, but never had been an eye witness to it.  Now these guys don’t sell anything on Ebay or offer digital downloads or anything and they have been paying $60 per month for Payments Pro and Virtual Terminal for over a year.

The thing that bothers me the most is that they have not been able to get a straight answer out of PayPal for days as to why the account was restricted or what is exactly needed to get it unfrozen.  And they have not been able to talk to an actual person that can tell them specifically what they need to unfreeze the account.  It seems that they had never manually processed a credit card up until now and that apparently triggered it.

What You Should Do

My advice is to use www. Squareup.com to process your credit cards an only use PayPal to take in subscription payments or set up payment buttons if that is the case.  You need to have more than one alternative for bringing in money.  Now this may seem like a pain in the ass, but trust me, it is far better than what I am seeing happening with this company.

Since they do a sizable portion of their business through PayPal, to say that it has hurt their business dramatically is an understatement.

If this can happen to them, trust me, it can happen to you and you need to have a back up plan for funding.  Make sure you look around at authorize.net and others.

While I have not had problems with my account, this does give me no small concern about what could happen.

To be fair, I will try and contact PayPal and see if I can get the full story.

I will also being doing some research on PayPal alternatives for you too and post them.  Now PayPal may indeed have a legitimate reason to request information from these guys and be that as it may, it is the worst case of customer service I have seen out of a company communications wise in some time.  They have spoken to at least 12 different people and spent hours on the phone trying to get to the bottom of things over the past week to no avail and all they keep getting is a form letter asking for the same info they have supplied several times.  They also got different information from different people about what they should and should not provide informaiton wise.  Like I said, jacked up.

Will keep you posted on this so that you can perhaps avoid this huge pot hole and keep your fingers crossed for them.

Cheers,

Andrew “Easy” Anderson