toofishes.net

No Thanks, PayPal

Got this lovely email from them yesterday:

Hello Daniel McGee,

We’re writing to let you know about a change to your PayPal account.

Starting 8/21/2011, money from payments you receive will be placed in a pending balance for up to 21 days. By doing this, we’re making sure that there’s enough money in your account to cover potential refunds or claims.

Even though you can’t access the money right away, please ship orders quickly and communicate with your customers. After 21 days, you can withdraw money from each payment as long as the customer hasn’t filed a dispute, chargeback, claim, return, or reversal. The money may be available sooner if:

  1. We can confirm that the item was delivered.
  2. Your buyer leaves positive feedback. (Applies only to eBay items)

This change isn’t necessarily permanent. We’ll review your account every 35 days and re-evaluate if we should continue to hold your payments. If we decide to stop holding payments, we’ll email you to let you know.

Why are my payments being held?
We reviewed your account and determined that there’s a relatively higher than average risk of future transaction issues (such as claims, or chargebacks, or payment reversals). We understand that it may be inconvenient to have your payments temporarily held but please know that we didn’t make this decision lightly.

Before deciding to hold payments, we consider many factors. These factors include account and transaction activity, the rate of customer disputes, the type of business a seller runs, average delivery timeframes, customer satisfaction, performance and history.

Questions? Let us know
We understand you’d like to have immediate access to the money you receive and we’re here to answer your questions about this change to your account.

For more information and tips on what you can do to avoid having your future payments held, please see our Frequently Asked Questions. To speak to a Customer Service representative, log in to your PayPal account and click “Contact Us” at the bottom of any page.

Thanks,
PayPal

Fuck you guys too. I do maybe one to two transactions a month with them, and this is totally out of the blue. I’m glad this isn’t my primary incoming route of my freelance income. Hope this gives everyone second thoughts about doing anything with incoming payments and PayPal. Perhaps you can see why we were uneasy as developers over at Arch Linux using them as a donation bank.

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