At 12:01 PM -0500 1/8/2010, John Musbach wrote:
On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 2:40 AM, Dan <[email protected]> wrote:
Don't get me wrong here. I'm not saying Paypal doesn't have room for
improvement. But as services go, they're one of the best out there. And
99.9% of the complaints you see spewed around the 'net are unfounded,
usually based on the customer failing to understand how payment processing
services, and their own credit cards, work.
What about this:
<http://forums.ebay.com/db2/topic/Seller-Central/21-Day-Hold/520175743>
Give it the smell test. There's an awful lot of information missing here.
First... If you received a message like that - and keep in mind that
the poster has NOT bothered to provide ANY of the ACTUAL message -
from the company handling your business financial account, would you
a) post a semi-off topic complaint in the *parent* company's public
forum (remember eBay <> Paypal!), or b) immediately contact that
financial company directly -- you know, call or email them? It is
your business on the line, after all... This person chose (a).
That's nutz IMO; a major red flag.
Apparently, it's not a complete account freeze; it's just a back-side
delay. That means the account can still receive and process payments
-no interference with the normal business-. The owner just cannot
withdraw funds *immediately*. Payment processors do this whenever
there are problems reported that may result in a customer not getting
a refund they're due. The delay is an easy way to cause the account
to generate a positive balance in order to cover such. [1]
The poster cites their stellar feedback and DSRs and says they've had
no complaints. Does that make sense? What are the chances of
selling that much stuff - 14,419 feedback (and only a percentage of
customers leave feedback!) and getting NO complaints?! I can't
imagine even a shipping service that's that good!
So what's missing here? What event caused Paypal to take this
action? It's possible that it was an error, but it's more likely IMO
that this poster ain't as rosy smelling as he/she/it wants you to
believe.
Can't research further because the person has created separate
posting and selling id's - and hasn't bothered to state their selling
id.
Again, I'm not saying there isn't a legit problem here. I'm just
saying that this particular complaint doesn't pass much of a smell
test. There's more to the story... Paypal does NOT nail accounts
for the heck of it.
[1] Paypal lets you "sweep" all the funds out of your account -
basically out of their reach - as often as you want. That's fine in
most cases. But it creates an extra level of pain when a customer
requires a refund. After a single complaint (valid or not!), MOST
payment processors would make the account holder maintain a large
escrow balance - sometimes as much as 2 to 3x their normal monthly
cash flow! Paypal's policy wrt this awfully pro-Seller. Traditional
services would never do this. But can you imagine the scream if
Paypal made all the Sellers maintain even a small balance?!
(still perusing thru all the pages in that thread; not seeing more
real info so far).
Got to the posts where they're claiming it's a Paypal system-wide
error. Not sure I believe that. The OP still hasn't provided any
real details. And if that were the case, a single call to Paypal
would fix it.
- Dan.
--
- Psychoceramic Emeritus; South Jersey, USA, Earth.
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