Thank you for your response. So they "review" the reserve within 6 months of placing it. Still sounds like an indeterminate amount of time that they can hold the money given that it's just a 'review'.
I guess the issue here is that it depends on 'performance', so I have to perform a certain way just to receive the money that is already mine? Hopefully you can see the frustration here. I'm attempting to go in and add tracking information to as many transactions as possible, since our shipping software is not doing it automatically (because paypal is a 3rd party on shopify checkout).
As far as "jiggling" capital around, $3500 is a lot of money for our business and not exactly a "jiggle" amount for us. If we had known they would be placing a reserve on it, then we wouldn't have utilized them in the first place. But of course, we were not told this. We've never had an issue with Paypal before this, and this account has been active for over 2 years with no issues of fraud or other problems with liabilities. Our business lives and dies based on repeat customers, which means that we are vested in making them happy and avoiding any kind of dispute.
We are still maintaining that, despite being kneecapped by paypal in the process. Like I said before, we are moving away from using them now because arbitrarily holding a large amount of our capital negatively impacts our business and adds undue stress to us. So I am doubtful our "performance" will improve to them in any significant way apart from time passing and no customers having any issues (as it has always been).
I'm hoping that adding tracking information onto the transactions will help, but I've already done so with many of them and it has not changed anything. So we'll see.
