my paypal experience - rolling reserve

Unfairpractices
Contributor
Contributor
After having my account in good standing for about 8 years, my business Revenues increase, and paypal automatically flags my account for random increases in revenues. after they freeze my whole account, they make me provide lots of documents about all my suppliers info, all previous transactions, and info about all of the merchendise i sell. The account is frozen, this means I cannot pay my sellers, if i cannot pay my sellers I will not have product and will not be able to sell to my buyers, which means no profits.  no money for food, money for rent.  They do not allow me to touch the 6,000$ in my account for "30-180 days" because they fear losses from chargebacks, granted I probably have a less than 1% chargeback rate.  A week later they unfreeze my account, i thank god finally I can do business.  After its unfrozen they tell me 50% of all my received payments will be on hold for X amount of time to cover chargebacks.  Ok so i think Selling on this account and losing 50% for a long period is worse than not selling at all , because I will eventaully run out of cash.   "Minimum reserve: 50% will be held in your account until $13,926.00 USD is reached."   I have paid paypal 10-20k in seller fees last year, and my account has been on good standing for for like 8 years, this company is seriously idiotic and the only reason people use paypal is because they dont know it sucks, OR because they have no other option.  
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9 REPLIES 9

lancelotme
Frequent Contributor
Frequent Contributor

what events trigger this rolling reserve>

where do you sell ?or do you have your own website?

Chargebacks and disputes are bad news,do you have more than your quota  of chargebacks,disputes >

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lancelotme
Frequent Contributor
Frequent Contributor

Have you considered applying for a merchant account with a bank or Costco if you are a member?

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Unfairpractices
Contributor
Contributor
Would that just be for bank wires and stuff? I do a lot of business with international buyers so PayPal is the necessary evil
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lancelotme
Frequent Contributor
Frequent Contributor

@Unfairpractices wrote:
Would that just be for bank wires and stuff? I do a lot of business with international buyers so PayPal is the necessary evil

If you are an Ebay seller,you accept PAYPAL ,do you mean your overseas buyers are using bankwire via PAYPAL to pay you?

There is no direct way to wire fund to one's Paypal account.

I think random surge of sales volume,iphones and overseas buyers are probably the reasons.

Where are these overseas buyers?Overseas chargeback ae nasty,it could come in after 6 months and hard to convince the credit card issuer due to local customs and language barrier.

Just curious,how do you ship smart phones overseas.how do you get signature confirmation ?  

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sharpiemarker
Esteemed Advisor
Esteemed Advisor

Don't put it all on PayPal's door.  What you sell is high risk.  If you do not want to deal with the high risk, sell rubber stamps.

 

Merchant account means Merchant credit card processing account.

 

Even though PayPal has seller protection, one should not rely on it too much on disputes because that is putting risk on PayPal. So again prepare your business to deal with some of the risks on its own, like choosing a return/refund policy in your eBay listing form or for your own website and issuing refunds without involving PayPal.  If you do not have many problematic transactions per year, you business should be able to survive a few refunds.  Or PayPal will do it for you with this rolling reserve program. All trades/businesses will have transactions that do not go well. Just do what you can to mitigate damage by using preventive measures like insuring your shipments, good communication with your customers like providing thorough order status updates and tracking information.


Kudos & Solved are greatly appreciated. 🙂
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Unfairpractices
Contributor
Contributor
They said its on rolling reserve because of the random increase in revenues, and because selling smartphones is "high risk". I'm top rated seller on eBay, also I don't think I've ever had a chargeback from somebody who didn't purchase through eBay in the last year.
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lancelotme
Frequent Contributor
Frequent Contributor

@Unfairpractices wrote:
They said its on rolling reserve because of the random increase in revenues, and because selling smartphones is "high risk". I'm top rated seller on eBay, also I don't think I've ever had a chargeback from somebody who didn't purchase through eBay in the last year.

I am sure Paypal will take all these in consideration-your Ebay status and no chargeback,but you are selling high risk merchandise.

You can go to Ebay seller forum-electronic goods and ask how other sellers deal with rolling reserves.  

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BrahimJ
Contributor
Contributor

This is very bad on Paypal especially when they calim that they want to help small buinesses.

 

Today , i just had the exact same problem in my account, I only sell tours so people pay me and we conduct private tours.

what trrigered this for me is the following, 

in the past i only took 30% from my cleint so that i can reserve the hotels and when tehy arrive they pay the remaining balance and that time i pay other suppliers, recently we started to see people who rather pay the full amount and get everything our of the way and even with paypal high fees we did that and there is more funds coming in.

 

thet asked for every document you can imagine and we provided it and still they decided to put 50% on hold for a period of 180 days,

basically, we can no longer do the business as we can't takle full payment and we can't even take deposits anymore as half will be on hold fro months.

 

I also want to mention that since we started with them we had 0 complaint, and 0 charge back

 

I hate paypal and I am looking for a better alternative.

Very Sad.

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Whac-A-Mole
Frequent Advisor
Frequent Advisor

AS A tour operator,you are providing a service,not selling tangible goods which you can prove delivery with ONLINE VIEWABLE TRCKING FROM a commercial carrier.

such tracking is needed to prove delivery and qualify for seller protection in case of chargeback and dispute.

You have no tracking,so if any of customer decides to file chargeback or file a dispute of item not received,you lose.

Irregardless of tracking or no tracking,tours are not eleigible for PAYPAL SELLE PROTECTION.

You should find another payment processor.like a merchant account or just ask them to wire you the money,I would offer to pay for their wire expenses if your margin allows.

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