Help!! Two payments inexplicably denied in the past week for "violating the Paypal user agreement"

[Borage]

I am a merchant who sells my handmade jewelry with a bigcartel store. I am fairly new to having my own website and have been using Paypal as my sole form of payment acceptance for about two months, and everything has been going just fine until now.

Suddenly, within the past week, two payments have been inexplicably and repeatedly denied with my shop, over $100 worth of lost sales, including one now on the line with me on another site demanding to know what's wrong.

The response by Paypal has been frustrating, with my initial customer first calling Paypal support and being told their payment was denied for "a reason they cannot say", then my contacting Paypal, being told to have my customer contact them again, and then having my customer receive the same response.

What gives? Does anyone have any experience with this? I'm at my wit's end and feeling very flustered with an angry customer and probable second lost sale on the other end. Is there anything that can be done?

[Quandary]

If a customer's payment is denied, it's not your problem and from many years of business experience, both online and brick and mortar, you should be relieved.   There can be various reasons on the buyer's end, names don't match between the card and buyer, the card exp date, the card issuer flagged the transaction as suspicious, the billing address or phone number provided during checkout does not match what the card issuer has on file, etc.   A lost sale upfront is much better than finding out after the sale the buyer has the item that you have been scammed.   If you're a small business, if someone takes you for $100, that's a big deal and money that you can never make up.

[Borage]

Thank you @Quandary. It crossed my mind that this person might be putting me on as well, but I really don't get that sense. Though I'm new to website ownership, I have been doing business on Etsy for five years prior and have seen scammers, but these people seem genuinely committed. The buyer offered to pay through their spouse's Paypal account with the same card and are getting the same error.

One solution I'd like to suggest to them is to transfer money into their spouse's Paypal account and pay that way - which I hope will work. Will that work?

[DPCreations]

So it an issue with the buyer's payment method.  PayPal will never disclose specific reasons for denied payments.  Your buyer needs to investigate their own payment methods and their own PayPal account status.  When the buyer uses another persons account for payment could make for some serious alerts to the the payment process.

Why doesn't the buyer just use a credit card and avoid a PayPal account?

[Borage]

Well in this case they tried a credit card followed by a Paypal account. It is the same for the other denied payment. I also just got a third denied payment in as many weeks just now so I came back to this topic to see if there were any solutions.

In both instances, when my customer inquired as to the reason of their denied payment with Paypal, they got a "we can't tell you" sort of response. So, both myself and my customers are left completely in the dark about what in god's name to actually do to solve the issue.