Paypal horror stories? Positive experience with Paypal?

I am looking into setting up paypal for recurring billing.

I've been warned to stay away from Paypal. The reason is that if anyone complains about your store, they will freeze your account. It's true that the wikipedia article on paypal has a section called "critical sites" (sites that criticize paypal). They have names like paypal horror stories, etc. One article made a good point that paypal is acting like a bank, but is not regulated heavily the way banks are. Imagine if your bank could freeze your money at any time if one customer complained about a purchase.

I was wondering if these problems are just 1 in 10,000 or if a large percentage of paypal users are upset with paypal. Can you please post on this thread if you've either had a positive, negative, or neutral experience with paypal? Thank you.

Thank you very much. It's useful to know that most amember websites use paypal and seem to be happy with it.

(to clarify, I don't mean that Paypal is attempting fraud, but that a buyer complains about you, and then Paypal automatically freezes your account, or so I hear.)

We've been using PayPal for three years and had 2 complaints that PayPal received from our consumers. Our experience resolving these disputes was smooth and easy, PayPal didn't cause any problems. They receive consumer's complaint + description, then they want your story and what you've done to resolve it. There's a period of time to work it out between parties. The "automatic freeze" is a myth. That probably only happens if you make no effort to resolve the issue.

Seems there's a lot of complaints by users out there, but I think that's from the old days when you were required to open a PayPal account in order to make a transaction. That's no longer the case.

hope this helps.

thank you! that's really useful

What A Load Of Rubbish Paypaldoput Freezes On Accounts Sometimes You Dont Even Find Out Till You Log On

Hi, We have been using PayPal since we sold our product and have withdrawn in excess of $80,000 without a problem. Just be sure you follow their guidelines and dont give them any reason to doubt your business and you will have no problems

We have been using paypal for sometime. i like to make something clear for you


if u aim to take in around 100-500 USD a month, u shall not worry much about using paypal. but if u taking in more.... there are several stages where they will freeze your payment.

1. further validation
2. when reached more then 3000USD
3. when many payments are being made to the account. they will have to verify you again


also if u just startet paypal and suddently take in our 500USD in 2-3 days. paid by many members. then they will freeze it for further validation.

All this is not done manually, its all automated system. thats why paypal give u very little reasons when ur account is limited. and paypal members gets pissed.

also if u have a personal account with paypal and premium/business account with paypal they will linkthe accounts, and if one gets limited the other will too.....

there are soo many things u will have to worry about. also if more then 4-5 members sudently dispute simutanously u will be limited.

if a user with paypal account sends u 50USD and 3 days later his account gets limited the payment made to u will be limited as well...

i can go on, and am serious there are MANY MORE.... but we have to admit. its not toys its real money, and ofcourse we need to respect the security in place.

personally i dont like paypal. but i got no other options. with other merchants there are much more validations i will have to go through.
i am only waiting for google checkout to be available in Europe. then i will be moving to google. ;-)

I have a very bad experience with paypal. They went crazy about my sales increase, they started sending me all these limited access amount crap and told me to send my id, fax etc. i sent them, still they weren't satisfied and told me to explain my buisness and i did that also, now they decided that my buisness is highly risky. So what the fukers did is hold my funds for 6/months. Amount $11k. They said 6 months because users can still put a chargeback within the 6 month. And its been 5 months now my funds is stuck with them. I havn't got a single chargebacks yet. They wont release it yet. i have to wait 1 more month to fulfil their stupid terms of services 180 days !!!

The point is if only they think ur buisness is risky they can hold ur funds. There's nothing you can do. its up to them to decide if its risky or not wtf ? Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
They Suck Suck Suck

Google 'paypal account limited'


enough said

More reasons Paypal Sucks

Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2007 12:33 AM
To: 'jselby@paypal.com'; 'slal@paypal.com'; 'matt.bannick@paypal.com'; 'ejackson@paypal.com'; 'galston@paypal.com'; 'dsacks@paypal.com'
Subject: RE: New Business Project

To Whom It May Concern:

Hello and thank you for your time. I seem to need some help from one of you on this list. I am sure you might get emails like this a lot but this is my last resort.

Two years ago a new business was started in China called EDIT COMPANY NAME. COMPANY NAME sells online game cards, for various software games and they are intended for training purposes only, but it is must like the old Game Sharks just for the PC games. So far in the last two years there have been many reps for them here in the USA and they have used Paypal to accept payment for these cards and some reps get shut down by paypal. I had a smaller site that I did the same thing only I have everything set up to be 24/7 service (website here). When COMPANY NAME saw my website and how I was selling cards they invited me to be there sole USA agent. Before I accepted I made a few phone calls and one of them was to Paypal to make sure I could in fact sell these online game cards through the Paypal system. I received the answer I was looking for, which was YES I could sell these cards using the Paypal system as they were not against the Terms of Service or on any list saying I could not sell them.

I talked to my son and after I got it set up he was going to run it so he could save up for college during his last year of High School. We then got my son a Paypal account and tried to sign up for a business account. We were stopped by verifying his SSN. We then called in and talked to THREE different reps and we got the same answer we do not need to provide that unless asked for it. I felt like saying HELLO we are trying to sign up for a business account and it is REQUIRED. Finally we got tired of playing pass the customer on your phone system and not getting results from your customer service. So my wife signed up and she got the same error. Finally a few weeks later my father in law was at the house when he over heard me talking to a Paypal rep on the phone about the issue. When I hung up the phone he told me to sign him up for an account after all he is a 72 year old man and his should work. Guess what SAME ERROR, unable to verify your SSN. Called Paypal got same answer.

So we decided to have two different websites for my son and father in law to run and make some extra money. I had one website set up and I was working on the second. Business was going good and next thing we know we ere shut down on my father in law account. So thinking we would get it resolved we used my son’s account to accept payments while we fixed the “limited” status on my father in laws account. Within a few hours my son’s, my wife’s, and my Paypal account was shut down. I never even sold anything through my account I only used it to pay for good and services and not issue, please take a look at it MY ACCOUNT HERE EDIT.

So for the next two weeks we faxed and uploaded everything, and so you know your system would NEVER verify my father-in-law’s SSN. We appealed and talked to a very nice lady in Claims Escalations Executives office. She said she was appealing for us and we needed to wait a few days, which we did. We were never told why the account was limited except that too many accounts at one address. When we explained what had happened and that all accounts were open long before any went limited. Now they changed the story to say we could not sell that item on Paypal, but once again they changed their story when I riddled off 10 other sites that sell the SAME EXACT ITEM and have been limited status too with Paypal. I also told them we had called in three different times to make sure we were allowed to sell this item. Next we were told we needed to upgrade to a business account, so we did. Then it was more fax this send that etc etc. Again another problem, we were accepting too many orders per day, so we build a daily limit into our website that counts the number of successful charges to our paypal account and then hides that paypal payment option. We started manually approving all new member to make then pass our own fraud checks. We set our paypal account up to only accept from the website, only confirmed paypal accounts, on and on everything they told us we should do as not expose ourselves to fraud.

After we met all Paypals needs, wants, demands, and desires we were once again told “Sorry your account is high risk because of the item you sell and Paypal is not willing to take that risk” I asked what makes something high risk and my answer was “Any transaction over the internet is considered high risk” WHAT?!?!?!?! The final word I heard from Paypal Claims Escalations Office was if I wanted to use Paypal would have to use the PayFlow Pro gateway, which I am more then willing to do. So I take some time off let everything cool down wait almost 2 months and contact Paypal again today to get the PayFlow Pro gateway account set up and start accepting Paypal again. After 6 hours of chasing down a merchant account and playing Email tag I was told I could use the gateway but could not accept Paypal payments?!?!?!?!?

Our business has grown from a few people sitting around saying we should do something like this to a multi-country around the world company. I know for a fact we are the only company that contacts Paypal to make sure we are playing by the rules and proving we are REAL PEOPLE WITH A REAL BUSINESS. We have done everything we were asked to do and more

All I ask is that someone PLEASE stop the madness, we have bent over backwards to please Paypal and to conform to the Paypal system. We have proven we are real people and we are NOT trying to rip people off. We do not want to expose ourselves to fraud and we welcome ANY input from Paypal to keep our business running smooth and secure as possible.

I am sure you are getting bored with this as I never thought trying to explain to someone my paypal account got limited and what we did to correct it would take so long to do.

All I ask is to PLEASE have the account reviewed, as it does not seem right we are trying to do business the right way yet we are the only ones limited anymore. Please let us know what we can do to make a working business relationship with Paypal.

Sincerely,


The reply I got:

Sorry we wish not to do business with you because the history of your account! Later he changed it to say the type of business we were in and finally changed to the type of product is “High Risk”

The History of the account was because I have 5 disputes within 15 days and two of them were charge backs from fraud due to paypal’s anti-fraud system failed to catch it. Now 5 sounds like a lot but I was in business for 45 days with paypal before they made the account limited and I had over 4300 sales! So .0001% of my customers were not happy and that was because they did not understand the new system! Paypal = Morons


It ok we just create a new account and take less sales each day, when we get close to $5,000 in one month we stop using that account and slowly transfer the money of it over a 1 week period by buying stuff like Web Hosting for they year, Thank Goodness I own a web hosting company. After the account is drained we do not go back to using it for at least 3 months. So yes to make this work 4 paypal accounts, 4 phone numbers, 4 addresses (PO Box work), 2 bank accounts both with free savings / checking, the last 2 to 4 digits will be different for routing purposes.


like I said Paypal = Morons!

d4rknull, you described almost EXACTLY what happened to us.

They kept saying they wanted more and more info to unlimit the account. Then they just said its high risk, good by. Frozen for 6 months.

No reasons why they did it, they just did. Once they freeze it, there is suddenly no way to talk to them. If you call they will say you need to send in a email which never gets responded to.

Call and ask for "Claims Escalations Executives office" Just keep asking until they give it to you. The first person will say they dont know what you are talking about or they give you to their supervisor.

BE NICE

You will never get that account back BUT I have learned that you can call in every 45 days and sak for SOME (about 25%) of the total funds. Just make sure you get the Exec name and direct phone number, this is why you have to be NICE. if you rude and mean they never give you the information.

Mine was Connie and she was cool to work with, and I understnad she is just doing her job.

PS I still write an email a week to the paypal executives.

ebay suspended account guide

Hey, ebay and paypal are corrupt to the core. I have a free guide that I wrote for everybody who has been pissed off at them. I show you how to make as many totally fake anonymous accounts as you want, how to get reinstated, and how to sell without getting suspended again. Check it out - eBay + Paypal Guide on suspended or limited accounts

also to everyone with frozen funds, you can withdraw them all in 180 days.
also, emailing and calling wont get you anywhere, but making fake accounts and photoshopping documents will

Good Experience

We're using PayPal to process subscriptions and it's been working fairly well. We're not using PayPal Payments Pro - just PayPal - so PayPal handles the subscription and informs aMember when payment has been processed. We also offer our customers direct credit card billing (Auth.NET)

We started with PayPal first - mainly because we wanted a payment solution that covered as many payment options as possible (CC, cheque, bank transfer, etc) and then added direct credit card billing later. Getting setup with PayPal was much, much easier than direct credit card processing. It's a good thing we did PayPal first - it was only days to get things working. Direct credit card took weeks because of all the paperwork, validation, back and forth, etc.

We've never run into the problems experienced by others where PayPal locked out the account. We did need to validate our account because our volume reached a threshold, like others, but after sending in our business license and federal tax ID form, we were all set. We are a US company - so maybe others had trouble from other countries.

Overall, PayPal has been a good choice. As the first payment system to setup, it was definitely the right decision because of expediency and ease. I do like the transaction dispute process with PayPal better than credit cards - it seems a little more fair between the customer and the business. We see about 1 or 2 disputes per month - mainly from people who think they canceled their subscription but didn't - and for some reason don't ask us for a refund directly.

The PayPal customer support site KB is very good. Customer support over the phone with PayPal is pretty poor - they are very polite but generally don't seem to know what's going on. Customer support through email is excellent and very responsive.

So overall, our experience has been very good and PayPal is a solid option for being able to allow people to pay from as many sources as possible. We see PayPal as a very good option for our international customers who don't always have a credit card. We would do it again - and definitely the setup experience was superb which helped us get revenue happening. If we had used direct credit card billing as our first option, we would have not had revenue for almost a month.

I just wanted to clarify that this is a common mistake. PayPal is definitely *not* a good solution for many "International" customers. I can assure you that without a credit card most of those customers can not use PayPal because uploading funds from local bank accounts is not allowed for some countries.

In other words, the only reasonable way to pay through PayPal in some countries is to have it connected to a credit / debit card so in order to use PayPal, the customer must have a credit / debit card anyway.

Another common mistake is that PayPal is a good choice as a replacement for credit card payment processor. Not always. While PayPal can accept payments from credit cards directly, it can do so only from the "PayPal allowed" countries. Fortunately, this is no longer such a big problem because PayPal now accepts a lot of countries but it's not perfect yet, if you do a lot of International business.

Slightly offtopic, I know

Tomas