Well it had to happen sooner or later and in my case it’s been later, but happen it has and I thought I’d share my story with you to file away for reference.
PayPal have limited (frozen) my business account possibly for up to 180 days.
That means I can receive payments but not withdraw or send money.
As far as I can tell the reasons are pretty much the same as we’ve all seen given in umpteen other incidents. Too many payments in too short a period of time (unusual activity) combined with a higher than normal rate of chargebacks (even more unusual activity).
Quite frankly it’s a bit of a nightmare as you can probably imagine.
When I saw several chargebacks come in just over a week ago, I phoned PayPal and asked them what they thought was going on and that I was concerned about my account. They were nice about it but even so I was quite worried having read all the horror stories.
One of them started talking about the “limitation” on my account (even though I couldn’t see anything wrong) and I then got passed to the chargebacks department who told me there wasn’t any limitation which tied up with what I was seeing in my PayPal account when I logged in.
Then two days later my account became limited. Hah!
I phoned them again and they said it would take 48 hours to unlimit my account after I’d given them proof of who I was (again) in the form of a bank statement and passport. I’d already done that before I phoned so I was hopeful.
But then the dreaded 180 day email came in. 🙁
I’ve spoken to them again and explained my business model to the very helpful guy and even pointed out that one of my products was SmartDD which uses the PayPal IPN system to do order fulfilment and digital delivery. He was very consoling and I could hear him tippy-tap typing away while I was talking and then he said something like “I’ve sent in an appeal for you as you seem like a very genuine and reasonable person, so hopefully the account will get unlimited for you soon.”
I’m not so sure…
He then went on to tell me that 180 days was actually the longest period anyone would have to wait and that it was actually reviewed every 30 days. Even so I’m not very hopeful.
That’s my sob story, now what does it mean to you?
Well, if you’re a subscriber to one of my services or memberships then it looks like direct subscriptions will continue to work and everything should be okay for you, and as I said earlier I can even continue to receive payments. However there’s one subscription service I tried as an experiment that I may have to cancel and that’s for the ThemesXD themes.
The subscription payments were supposed to come in over the last 2 days but nothing happened and I’ve now realised that’s because I used JV Zoo and PayPal Adaptive Payments.
Now then. Pay attention and learn something important that I’ve just learned over the last few days.
Avoid PayPal Adaptive Payments at all costs.
If you’re going to use an affiliate scheme, use the rotating payments method instead. This is a simple system where if the commission is 50%, it means you get one payment and the affiliate gets the next and so on so that you both get every other sale, ie 50%.
That’s nice and safe because even if PayPal freeze your account, your affiliates won’t suffer as they’re paid directly into their accounts and the payments that you get just sit in your account until the day PayPal unfreeze it.
That’s then a happy situation for your affiliates and a not so disastrous situation for you as at least one day the money will eventually become available. So not great, but also not very bad.
As it stands I’ll have to cancel all the ThemesXD Adaptive Payments pre-approvals and ask members to re-subscribe. But I’ll probably throw in some goodies to make it worthwhile so it should be okay with everybody I hope. I may even do it completely differently this time round.
As for what other changes I’ll be making then you’ll see me using ClickBank more often as that means you can still use PayPal and I’ll still get paid, so that could be the best solution for now. Especially as I own a couple of “warm” CB accounts that are verified and will send me money directly to my bank account every 2 weeks.
I’ve also kicked off the process for a 2Checkout account, and today I took a look at Payza.com which used to be AlertPay. It looks very interesting and seems to now have a lot of the same functionality as PayPal.
Apparently they’ve merged with a British company too.
However when I tried to sign up I received a message that said “United Kingdom, we are coming soon!” so I rang them and the guy said they were doing a lot of system changes and integration and that the UK would go live early in the new year.
Okay, I’m looking forward to that and I hope it’s worth it.
(It seems that for their new systems they’ve concentrated on the US, Canada, India and Bangladesh to begin with, plus lots of other countries, but not the UK yet.)
If you know of any decent payment processors or have anything to add about any of this, then by all means please leave a comment.
-Frank Haywood
Sorry to hear about that Frank. Paypal operates on the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. And if you don’t like it, you are welcome to leave. Thanks for the adaptive payment tips.
Hi Pol,
Well yep, PayPal don’t have to do business with anyone they don’t want to and neither do we. It’s very disappointing though if you think of it as years of clean business and good behaviour punished by a change in circumstances that was largely out of my control. *sigh*
-Frank
Chalk another one up to PayPal and their “guilty until we decide IF you’re innocent” policies. I always recommend to clients that they set up a separate account for PayPal, and then transfer funds from their PayPal to their main account in anticipation of something like this.
In any event, have you looked at Stripe.com? They have an API that allows one to take credit cards, without having to have a merchant account.
Perhaps it’s even something that you could incorporate in to the new version of SmartDD (hint hint, prod prod).
Hi Ray,
That’s the kind of thing I’m after. There must be loads of different solutions out there to the problem and that looks like a really good one. They do all the sensitive stuff that we as small businessed don’t want to touch and leave the developers to write clever code around it. I like that a LOT but the only downside for me is it looks like it’s US and Canada only. 🙁
I’ve added it to my notes and also found another one that’s EU only – https://www.paymill.com/en-gb/index.html.
I wonder if we could add both of those so we can at least cover North America and the EU? 🙂
Hmm…
-Frank
Frank – have you considered getting your own merchant account? iPowerPay (http://www.ipowerpay.com?900878 is my aff link if you want to use it) deals with online merchants all the time and understands our business model, with no explanation or apologies. They are used by virtually all of the “big” names in the industry.
Hi Jeanette,
I had a merchant account a few years ago when I was selling physical goods. The problem here in the UK though is it’s prohibitively expensive unless you’re doing plenty of volume. And it was a pain to implement too. I was using a Natwest merchant account together with Protx (now SagePay) and it wasn’t bad once I’d got it all up and running, but the merchant account was only good for ONE web site. If I wanted to set up another site I had to pay for everything all over again. Madness.
When PayPal started allowing the UK to accept credit cards without making the customer sign up I dumped the merchant account and saved a pile of money each month and gained the flexiblity of being able to open up other sites without it costing me anything extra.
I’ll have a good look at all the suggestions I’m being given so thank you, but I suspect some of them will be US-centric and I live in the UK. 🙂
-Frank
Frank, I’ve been there and done that. Paypal limited my account for 30 days stating it was their Security software that flagged my account. Like you I called and ask about the limitation and what could have caused their software to flag my account because there had only been 3 payments and two of them I issued refunds because they had ordered items that had gone “out of stock”.
Checking on the ebay community I found that Paypal will randomly limit accounts and had been doing this for years.
I switched all payment from my store to Moneybookers, and 30 days later the limitation was removed. Because of that I never leave much money in my paypal account just in case.
Good luck Frank.
Gary
Hi Gary,
It’s madness not having any stability and living in fear that your account is going to be frozen or closed isn’t it? And every time it’s done to innocent victims – yes I consider myself that – they’re creating one more “barbarian at the gate” ready to go somewhere else and promote that other service.
I get they’ve got problems in their industry but it seems they’re also not good enough to deal with them properly and when they do it’s always a knee-jerk reaction rather than a considered action. For instance no-one bothered to ask me what my take was on it all, yet they insist on holding a lot of information on me including my phone number – so what’s the point in them doing that if they don’t use it?
I’ll give Moneybookers (now Skrill) another look over – thank you for that.
And yes, like you I never leave much money in my PayPal account just because of the potential situation that’s happened. There’s never more than a few hundred dollars in there but if I leave things a they are it will build up into a nice sum of cash as subscriptions come in. One of the two joint problems I have now is the work involved in using a different payment processor (CB does look the favourite as I have much of it already set up) and the other is paying my contractors. 🙁
-Frank
Sorry to hear that Frank, unfortunately we’re all walking the Paypal tightrope. I asked my bank a couple of years ago about how much it would cost to set up credit card merchant facilities. Think I was quoted about £200 a month which seemed a bit steep to me, depends on your profit margins I guess whether you can make it work for you or not. That was HSBC, maybe you bank with someone else, might be worth asking the question.
Anyway fingers crossed you get it sorted
Cheers
Rob
Hi Rob,
Yes that’s the problem in the UK with haivng a merchant account it’s prohibitively expensive. When I was looking for a merchant account in 2005, Worldpay seemed to be the one that lots of sites were using. I rang them up and they wanted a 5 grand float for at least 2 years. I just laughed and told the lady her company policies were insane. Then I found Protx who handled the payment processing and got the merchant account from Natwest – I can’t remember how much I had to pay for that but at least it was affordable.
The sad thing is that in the 7 years since then, it’s not much better. Services mentioned in earlier comments like Stripe and PayMill seem to be the right way to go and if they get it right they’ll kill all other services including PayPal. Living in the UK I’m quite excited about PayMill and I’ll have a good look at how they work tomorrow and if it’s all as good as my cursory once over has impressed on me. I’ll gladly get SmartDD updated to work with those services if it gives us all better options at taking control over the whole payment process. 🙂
-Frank
Hi Frank
Thanks for the horror story warning. Here is a bit of info. I’d noticed that my XD themes payment due yesterday hadn’t gone through. Just now I had a look on the Paypal account. The pre-approved or adaptive payment set up (in the JVZoo name) had been deactivated and a message said that it was done for account safety. To activate it again a pin had to be reset. I’ve cancelled it and will wait to hear about your new arrangements.
This 180 day process needs a major rethink…..maybe the UBS fraud case being back in the news today spooked them.
Hi Gordon,
Aha! I’ve been waiting for someone to tell me that. Okay that’s good and I’ll sort something else out over the next few days.
I think the 180 day process comes from some banks having that period of time that their customers can do chargebacks, which seems a little bit excessive to me in terms of buyer protection but maybe not to others. I just don’t know…
-Frank
I went through this process about a decade ago. My account was frozen for four months. In my case, PayPal received notification that I had office in Afghanistan and I was being investigated as by EVERYONE, including the FBI.
This came as a complete shock to me. I later discovered that someone in the Middle East had used American company names to set up “shell companies” in the Middle East to funnel money through. It was like winning the lottery in reverse. The next four months were excruciatingly long as I only received payment from local Florida clients who mailed checks once a month instead of using PayPal.
Four months later I received the green light and haven’t had any problems since.
I can’t imagine them taking longer with your situation than they did with mine, especially when you consider that my situation involved the FBI! Of course, as life has taught me many time over, never say never!
Hi Jim,
OMG. I think I’d have a nervous breakdown if I had to live through something like that – I’m on tenterhooks as it is now beneath my calm collected writing exterior. 😉 I mean that – I’m a bit of a wreck even though in the big scheme of things it may be no big deal, it’s still a big deal to me as I’ve always looked for other people’s approval and wanted to be liked all my life. I feel like a little boy who’s just been shouted at and had the back of his legs smacked.
And it stings…
-Frank
Hi Frank…….and commiserations. I have actually done a whole heap of research on this and put together a guide on how to prevent it happening. Its sold on Amazon, here are the links:
For people in U.S..http://www.amazon.com/The-Payment-Protector-System-ebook/dp/B008C8T58K
For people in UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Payment-Protector-Systemebook/dp/B008C8T58K
If anyone wants a pdf copy then get in touch at: colinh@liberationbooks.com
If you want a free review copy Frank then let me know!
Hi Colin,
Thank you. Yes please on the review copy, and I WILL give you a review on Amazon as I know how important they are.
-Frank
Hi Colin. Your UK ebook link didn’t work for me but I found it via the Amazon home site. Thanks, Gordon
Hi Gordon,
I’ve fixed the link – it was missing the identifier at the end. Here they are again:-
For people in U.S..http://www.amazon.com/The-Payment-Protector-System-ebook/dp/B008C8T58K
For people in UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Payment-Protector-Systemebook/dp/B008C8T58K
-Frank
No problem with review copy Frank. Can you let me know where to send it. Grateful also for your kind offer of a review on Amazon. Here’s the link:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Payment-Protector-Systemebook/dp/B008C8T58K
Hi Colin,
I’ll drop you an email in just a moment, thank you. 🙂
-Frank
Sorry to hear about that Frank. Paypal will get one of us sooner or later. Moving to Clickbank is smart, but now, clickbank has a coding system to charge higher fees….lol.
But I am sure your Paypal account will be unfrozen soon. Just have a little faith and hope. That will help.
-Ken
Hi Ken,
Thanks for that. Yeah I noticed the colour coding system when I logged in today – all my accounts are green at the moment but I’m not even sure what that means yet, hehe. 🙄 I guess I’ll find out in due time.
I’ll try to keep the faith, but I’m not very hopeful. Well I am but I don’t think it will help much in this case. Time will tell and I’ll keep you posted.
-Frank
I was sorry to hear of your predicament.
I was reading some 12 months ago from an ebook why this im guy actively hated Pay Pal. They just froze his account. Jeez I thought. Ten days after reading it I had a limitation of account notice “which can not be appealed against” email.
I couldn’t believe it. No explanations. Nothing. Phoned them over in Dublin. Waste of time – I should have communed with the dead instead.
“You or someone with a similar name have violated the terms of the account so both accounts have been limited. This limitation can’t be appealed against.”
Still can’t figure it but it’s abundantly clear that our money was good enough in the early days (but not now) and now they just behave like the online dictatorship they have become.
I was concerned there might be a breach of security. Did I inadvertently sign up for a second account? Well even if I did I have only on account tied to a bank account so wouldn’t be able to send or receive anything. I have since changed my cards that were back up funding sources there just in case of hacking.
Anyone new to taking online transactions would be advised to find other ways of receiving payment and not be held to ransom in this manner – you might regret it otherwise.
If all this sounds a revelation, type “hate paypal” into Google.
Hi Chris,
Yeah it’s funny how life can do things like that isn’t it? Lots of times.
There have been all sorts of theories put forward by people who’ve had their account frozen or closed including things like they shared an IP address as they lived in a building where someone else had been playing up, or they were issued a new IP and they were unlucky as it happened to be some other bad PayPal user, or any number of reasons. The fact is as PayPal don’t give us exact reasons why they do these things, just a vague “for security reasons”, we’ll never know for sure what’s happened. They don’t want to talk about it and that’s the shameful thing as they don’t even respect us enough to listen to what we have to say. (They might learn something they don’t want to know?)
Whatever. I think I’m done with PayPal now. Yesterday it was still a disaster to me, but today is a new one and I’m dealing with it. And you and the other kind souls who’ve left a comment have helped greatly with that so thank you.
-Frank
I sympathize with you but as an affiliate who’s been buying different tools in the hope of getting one sale for 7 months now. I wish I had your problem. Not that I don’t understand your concern but it something that can be worked out with a little of patience. You will get your money. And thanks for sharing I will remember what to do when that time comes.
Hi Felix,
Ah, been there, done that. The solution is to create a product that you would want yourself and put it out there. Give it away and build a list (I see you’re using that plugin I told you about – it caught my eye immediately – but try putting it on the “Submit” button instead), or offer it for 100% commission. But the most important thing is to build your mailing list. Once you have a list then your job as an affiliate become easier as long as you give good advice.
Drop me a line if you want to know any more. 😉
-Frank
Been there done that with PayPal Frank but with a partner back in “02”. They were no where as friendly back then either. Getting someone on the phone was next to impossible.
$4,500+ USD in limbo for over 6 months.
So I did the merchant account thing – OUCH!
Merchant account through Humbolt Bank (US) $150 set up.
Shopping cart set up and running another $500.00.
Then the gateway used was Authorize.net $49.95/mo US
+ 25? per transaction fee + 2.95% card/discount fee
+ $400.00 per year for a security to run security scans on our server (Required by Card Companies – at least in the US).
Ya put all that together and it only took me about a year to decide to go back to PayPal. But by then, (As things sometimes go), we weren’t selling enough to raise any eyebrows.
Hate that the PayPal caged your money. Let us know what you think of the alternative you end up with my friend.
Inquiring minds wanna know.
Hi Mike,
It’s nice to hear from you again. 🙂
Yeah I’ve been hearing similar stories to yours by email too – merchant accounts have traditionally been expensive. I have hopes though that companies like Stripe and Paymill will replace the “e-wallet” style tech of companies like PayPal and even go so far that we can all move (like Germany) to instant credit transfers. (Germany never really adopted PayPal but they’re something like the 3rd or 4th in number of domains registered and ecommerce.)
That has to be more secure all round as the onus then is on the banks – which it already is – to prove that people are who they say they are. It’s impossible now to get a bank account in the UK without extensive proof and a visit in person to the bank itself. When I was a lad all I needed was something official addressed to me such as a utility bill. There’d still be a problem with international transactions but it would be a step in the right direction.
What gets me though is that in my case I think it’s the chargebacks that got me. But, they’re MY chargebacks – I’m the one who’s responsible for them and will have to ensure the payment is returned so what does it matter to PayPal? They know who I am and where I live. It doesn’t really make sense – I’m a responsible person.
And PayPal only have a few hundred dollars of mine at the moment but that will grow though (subscriptions) and even if they choose to close my account at the end of the 180 days, I’ll have a nice little nest egg built up.
So it’s a bloody inconvenience, but that’s about it. It’s never the end of the world. 😉
We’ll work around it like we work around everything else.
-Frank
I hate PayPal, too. I would love to be able to stop dealing with them completely. Re: 2checkout, though, they will do the same thing. They cancelled my account with no warning, and it took 6 months before I finally got a check mailed to for what THEY considered was a fair amount. Huh?
Hi Bradley,
Yep, well, sadly it’s a case of they don’t have to do business with anyone they don’t want to do business with. But then neither do you.
What’s really getting to me now though and it’s what’s been highlighted by all of this, is they should be nothing more than a payment gateway and that should be it. A high number of chargebacks? Surely as long as there’s a good history there of payments coming in regularly then the account owner is responsible and has to pay them back. It stings the account owner and adjustments are made by him or her to minimise it, but in the big scheme of things it shouldn’t really matter that much to the gateway.
-Frank
Sorry to hear about your problem Frank.
Now you’re making me really think about my current relationship with PayPal.
Looks like I need to have a backup payment plan just in case something like what you went through comes to me.
Thanks for the great sharing here Frank. Do keep us posted on the status of your PayPal account. 🙂
Hi Eruwan,
Thanks for that. It’s been cause for some concern here no doubt about it, but I have ClickBank as my immediate backup plan and hopefully I can use a service like Paymill (or Stripe in the US and Canada) to eventually fix everything up to my satisfaction again.
And yeah it’s been a good lesson here for us to have some serious thought about alternatives and spread the payment services around where possible so that one being taken out isn’t such a shock as this has been.
As far as PayPal goes I think we’re done. I don’t trust them any more to behave in the way I would expect when something like this happens.
Here’s the thing. I’m a developer of payment processing software and digital delivery systems. Up to now they’re centered around PayPal, but while I’ll still include PayPal in them, I’ll also be building in support for lots of other systems too and encouraging people to use multiple payment processors.
This ties in with that “barbarians at the gate” comment I made in an earlier reply. 😉
I would be doing it if I hadn’t had problems with them.
-Frank
You are being rather calm about this.
Businesses in the UK have to declare for tax at end of year.
What do you do if your funds are locked up and you can’t pay the taxman?
Will Paypal pay your fine?
Paypal are unreliable.
I had a small balance ( under £5 so I couldn’t withdraw it).
I wanted to buy something and a note on the Paypal cart said that if your purchase was more than your balance they would take your balance and apply for the rest from your bank account.
They don’t. They left my balance & took from my bank account.
I know it is a small thing but bloody annoying.
Hi Jim,
Yeah I’m a laid back calm sort of guy and always have been. And yes I do get excited and have a rant every now and then but it’s usually kept in these four walls at home and I don’t do it publicly. In the end nobody’s really interested in me blowing off some steam are they? 🙄
(It’s one of the reasons I stopped reading newspapers and watching the “junk” news – 99% of it doesn’t affect me and I can’t do anything about it even if it did. My productivity has increased.)
I keep my money in a bank, not in PayPal. There’s never more than a few hundred dollars in my PayPal account at any one time. I’ve read the horror stories of people having thousands or tens of thousands frozen in their PayPal account without warning so I’ve always made sure not to keep much money in there. It comes in, it travels to my bank account.
And yeah I’ve noticed that with PayPal taking money from the bank account in order to leave funds in their coffers by default. It’s been a long time since I looked but I think there’s a setting in your profile where you can change the default funding source to your PayPal balance rather than your bank account.
-Frank
PayPal horror just seems to keep on and on. Am having the most awful time trying to have PayPal guide me in how to set up digital goods on my own tangible goods website (PayPal based). Currently am having to sell digital goods through separate webpages because I have a paid download management org ensuring security over my downloads so PayPal is not involved in that aspect. PayPal is involved in receiving payments & triggering notification to download manager and all
I just want is the code to include it in my normal custom shopping cart. I can’t get answers from
them – they don’t respond to emails & their call centre staff as very limited.
If anyone can help with this I would be very grateful. I too am looking for an alternative to PayPal as they seem to have become a law unto themselves – perhaps they have grown too big and lost control and need to have whacky security issues set in place because they can’t find staff with the expertise required to handle the volume and new types of problems. Just a thought !
Hi Sue,
I think you could be onto something with your final comments there. Maybe they do so much volume it’s become easier just to close people down rather than work with them to resolve problems? We’ll never know because they don’t seem to want to talk to us.
But it’s not just the smaller businesses who get frozen either by the looks of it. According to Wikipiedia here (okay take it with a pinch of salt) there have been a number of high profile incidents including this one:-
“In September 2010, PayPal froze the account of Markus Persson, developer of independent video game Minecraft. Persson stated publicly that he had not received a clear explanation for why the account was frozen, and that PayPal was threatening to keep the money if they found anything wrong. His account contained around €600,000.”
They were going to “keep the money”. Is that over the top and out of control or what? Granted Markus shouldn’t have allowed the money to sit in PayPal and I think he learned a big lesson there and then.
As far as digital delivery goes then there are a great number of solutions that are relatively easy to use and work with PayPal – I’m the co-owner of one of them called SmartDD (currently off the market while we’re upgrading to v4) and I’ve used it for tens of thousands of transactions with only a small number of hiccups.
If you’re using a service to do digital delievery, then instead look around for some self-hosted software you install on your site. Most of it doesn’t need SSL as the payment processing is done by PayPal which then reports back to the script all the details so that the script can do the digital delivery. You pay for the software once and you use it as much as you like.
When we release SmartDD v4 then we’ll do so for a few days at a discounted price to subscribers, but even after that there will be a free limited version plus the full “no limits” version at around the $97 mark. Well worth it.
-Frank
I had the same problem one year ago!!! Now I warn all. Do not use PayPal. It is the company of [edited]!!! We strongly recommend to be farther from this service [edited].
1. PayPal Fully Controls Your Funds and can Freeze Your Account at Any Time, Leaving You without Access and without a Payment Solution!
2. Once an account is frozen it’s often held by PayPal for Months on end While Your Bills Pile up and Your Business Stands Still!
3. Avoid Getting Your Account Frozen and A Domino Effect that Prevents You From Fulfilling Orders That Cause You More Stress because of Chargebacks!
Hi Sergey,
I hope you don’t mind I edited your comment a little. To anyone who is reading this, Sergey does NOT like PayPal.
I tend to agree with you Sergey and I don’t believe PayPal should hold the position it does, but then I’ve thought that for a long time. Using them has (no mistake about it) been convenient, but I always thought it was only a matter of time before something bad happened to my account there. I’ve been putting off and putting off doing something about it for a long time now, but I think now that I can step back a little and look at it a little more dispassionately now I’ve made the decision to dump them for good.
I’ve switched to ClickBank and run a test sale this evening and it all seems to be working okay. My real aim now though is to move to Paymill.com as I really like the look of what they’re doing and I even had a reply back from one of their managing directors when I asked for some info that wasn’t quite clear enough on their FAQ page. I could be mistaken but they look like the perfect service to accept payments and their setup allows you to operate it like a merchant account but with none of the setup fees involved. The downside is you have to be based in the EU, but you can accept payments from anywhere in the world.
I found that site thanks to Ray who mentioned Stripe.com (US and Canada only, same concept as Paymill), and then someone on their site mentioned Paymill and there it was.
I’ve made the decision to get SmartDD updated to hook into both services so that should be a case of making a LOT of people happy.
The only thing I need to resolve now is how to pay affiliates who promote and I’m not sure Paymill and Stripe are the right platforms to do that particular function. It may be that we have to come up with soemthing a bit clever, but then we enjoy that. 😉
-Frank
Hi Frank,
sorry when i ask, have i miss some part???
because i have become from paypal the message about the jvzoo that the membership is cancel,
i think it will be about the xd-themes, must i do a new membership or how it will be work???
thanks and regards from finnland wo is start the snow 😉
Olaf
Hi Olaf,
Yes I have to set the membership back up again. It’s one of a big list of things I have to do thanks to PayPal, and I *think* I want to do it slightly differently this time round – still thinking about it. I should have something for you next week. 😉
-Frank
Hi Frank,
ok then i will wait for you befor i subcribe new 😉
BR.
Olaf
Hello Frank
Sorry I have only seen your message today, because I do not go to [edited out to prevent spam harvesters] very often so I have entered a better one above. I use Paypal but not often so I do not know much about them. I know of AlertPay and Payza. Hope your problems are sorted now.
Thanks and take care
Stella Sutton
Hi Frank,
how are you, i hope good and a good happy new year,
i want ask you what is going on now with the xd-themes membership?
will this be go back for selling and will we become back the themes, because in the moment it is the last download the 5 xd-themes?
or will this part not go on in the future?
it will be nice when you can tell about this part
best regards
Olaf
Hi Olaf,
I’m “back in the saddle” and I’ll have it up and running in the next few days. 😉
Thanks for asking.
-Frank
Ok Frank,
will we become some email about it when you have work it back? and with some instruction what we must make to become the membership back??
see you
Olaf
Hi Olaf,
I still have some issues to overcome with the membership and payment processors, so rather than delay any longer I’ve decided to run a regular sale instead. 🙂
-Frank
Thank you for this great information, everyone. I just set up a site for publishing services, and I’m using PayPal for the Order buttons.
I know most of you offer products instead of services. Can you recommend a good payment processing that will work for services, too?
Thank you!
Hi Sara,
PayPal is okay for accepting payments, but as I found to my cost you should set up other payment processors too. To control the provision of services to customers, then that’s a different kettle of fish. What you really want is some decent software that will handle that for you and also work with the payment processor you’ve selected. It becomes difficult.
I deeply understand that there’s a real need for decent software to do this kind of thing. There are plenty of options if you want to provide digital products, or even if you want to drip-feed information out to paying subscribers, but to handle product delivery as a service can be difficult, as can providing the service and customer handling itself. If you’re a subscriber, then just reply to one of my emails and tell me what you’re trying to do – the more detail the better – and I’ll take note for the future. If you’re not, then go sign up in that box top right on the home page and reply to the email you get sent once you’ve confirmed. 🙄
-Frank
Frank, have you seen this story about Paypal and their changes yet?
It seems they will make changes to their Frozen Funds Policy, imagine that. Me, I’ll believe it when I see it. The story is here:
http://www.examiner.com/article/big-paypal-changes-ahead-frozen-fund-process-to-gain-transparency
Thanks,
Gary
Hi Gary,
Hey thanks for that, no I hadn’t heard about it at all. My own recent experience with their current methods means you just get passed around from department to department and no-one can actually deal with anything out of the ordinary. It’s most definitely a case of guilty until you can wade through the murky slime of their processes to prove yourself innocent.
In my case a simple phone call explaining what had happened should have had it all resolved. No-one would even acknowledge what I was talking about – it seemed to be outside the remit of the people on the phone lines.
It’s quite poor for such a large company and I can’t imagine Amazon working like that. Speaking of which, apparently Amazon have a PayPal-like system too I’m told which gives one-click purchase access to their millions of customers. It might be unsuitable, but as I find out more I’ll let you know.
I do know that I trust Amazon more than I trust eBay/PayPal.
While I’ve been looking around I’ve found quite a few payment processors, some of which are most definitely next generation. PayPal will start to lose ground to these especially with people like me having software for them. I’m not going to spoil it but there are some interesting times a-coming on that front.
I wonder if PayPal have woken up and smelled the coffee? I wonder if they see this new breed of competitor and so they’re trying not to lose customers to them?
Look at it this way. If they freeze someones account and that someone goes out of business then PayPal don’t care. But if there are better alternatives and people like me make them more accessible to the public, then PayPal are going to lose business themselves especially when the buzz starts among the marketing community. That buzz always eventually spreads outside and regular businesses start to take notice too.
Yeah I agree with you. I’ll believe it when I see it too.
-Frank