ATTENTION ZINE CREATORS, ARTISTS, AND ANYONE WHOSE BUSINESS UTILIZES PRE-ORDERS AND PAYPAL
As of June 15th, 2018, PayPal has changed their user policy with little to no fanfare at all in ways that could literally destroy your business. I’m going to say this as plainly as possible:
DO NOT USE PAYPAL AT ALL IF POSSIBLE.
I know this is a lot to ask, especially since PayPal is the most globally accepted digital tender, but unless you want to lose access to your funds for six months and PayPal possibly forever, you need to read this.
PayPal Business accounts are now being flagged, locked, and completely shut down if:
1. If you haven’t shipping anything within 21 days of your first transaction
2. You’ve received more than 200 orders
and/or
3. You’ve made an excess of $20,000 (USD)
If this happens to you, you will not be able to access your money for up to six months. PayPal is NOT willing to work with you, all they will say is there’s nothing they can do, they’re cutting business ties, and offer you the MAILING address of their legal department. That’s right, you can’t even get a direct line to these people, they’re just going to tank your business by dicking around with your money for six months. Your only options are to:
1. Wait six months and frustrate customers, and by-proxy tarnish your reputation.
2. Refund everyone, possibly lose their business, and tarnish your reputation.
3. Pursue the matter legally, which will likely take longer than six months anyway, not to mention cost money out of pocket.
IF YOU ARE CURRENTLY USING A PAYPAL ACCOUNT FOR PRE-ORDERS, GET OUT NOW. Deposit your funds and part ways with PayPal as a tender, this is not a battle they’re willing to let you win.
Thankfully most of my stuff is filtered through other sites first but fucking here we go again.
It used to be you could get around this by marking your stuff as digital goods that dont need shipment notification but I dunno if that’ll work anymore. All I know is paypal has been making it increasingly difficult for a lot of artists and creators lately and it’s a logistical nightmare for a lot of us.
I need to finish my storefront.
Why are they doing this? It seems to make their service clumsy and unusable. Is Paypal drunk and dumped so badly they turned mean??
It’s likely another way to try and stop sex workers or adult content creators from using their services.
It started out with “you can’t use a stage name unless you have a business account”. Which means you get a chunk of your money taken as a processing fee, but get to use a “business” name instead of your real name AND LOCATION, cause that’s a thing they were forcing you to post too unless you upgraded.
People used to tell me all the time when they put a tip in my tip jar that it was telling them my real name and the city I lived in, so eventually I bit the bullet and upgraded to avoid that. (Which is why ko-fi was/is so great, because it’s essentially a paypal wrapper that lets you use the service while not revealing your identity and location.)
But they’ve been making it increasingly harder and harder to run an online business for anyone who doesn’t ship physical items that can be tracked. Like part of it is likely to ensure that customers are getting what they paid for, but when it comes so quickly on the heels of numerous policy updates regarding sex work and adult content, it is undoubtedly linked to making it more difficult for those people to use their services.
Patreon might be doing my head in with their site constantly breaking, and they fuck up on communication issues a lot, but this is largely why they changed who they do their payment processing with, to avoid paypals “no naughty business” policies. They still use paypal and Stripe, but they moved their handler to other countries with less draconian laws, and broadened to other payment processors because of this kind of thing.
When I get my own site up, I will not be using paypal, which sucks cause everyone uses paypal. But I also cannot abide their business practices and ethics. Or the apparent lack thereof.
I contacted Paypal TODAY so if you guys could spread this around so people that use paypal would know that’d be great!
So when you do digital goods you go to “TRACKING INFORMATION” and then select “ORDER PROCESSED” and you’ll be fine and won’t get into trouble!
Marshmellowmilktea 