As you probably know, the last 6 months since the MK2 release were quite a ride 🙂 And now PayPal blocked our funds! We cannot send money, cannot transfer them to our bank and we cannot even refund customers. This happened without warning over night and of course you don’t anticipate things like this. We cannot pay our suppliers with PayPal, which is what we used to do. You ask why? We grow too fast, we do not ship immediately so PayPal probably thinks we want to run away with the money. The fact that we had only around 3 chargebacks in our 2-year history doesn’t matter to them. The only logic is = growing too fast, something is wrong.
How does partnership with PayPal work?
After you go thru the initial checking, you haven’t won by any means. PayPal is actually very conservative and they will make your road to success increasingly rocky.
First problem for a Czech company is that the only way how to get the funds out of Paypal is to transfer them to your bank account. A little catch is in the fact that it can only be done exclusively in Czech crowns after converting with a very bad exchange rate. So on top of their normal transaction fee you lose roughly another 2% on top of that.
Right after you sell more than $100,000 monthly, everything above that will be held for 21 days. Once a month you can ask for increasing the release amount, but you will be ignored for a couple of months. They will eventually increase it by $50k and you have to ask again and again …
After some time, they realize it is not enough and they increase the release limit drastically. But they also employ a so called rolling reserve, for example they will hold 12% for the duration of 60 days. We were ok with this as reserve in case something went really wrong… but..
When the rolling reserve grows to several hundred thousand dollars, they block your funds altogether. They even block the option to refund customers who ask for it, for example when they change their minds during waiting.
When you explain to them how anti consumer this is, PayPal will allow you to work with a few percent from the new payments. Right now we don’t have any new information but last information was that they will release funds for printers we shipped. Because our delivery dates are 5-6 weeks it might seem like a reasonable thing but customer can dispute undelivered goods for up to 180 days on PayPal. What Paypal is doing right now would make sense only if we are about to go bankrupt or running away with the money.
For PayPal you are always a possible scammer and fraud. We told them that we will have a bump in the sales. Sent them the Make: magazine explaining what is going on but no one cares. They don’t care about the important information, they always ask for historical records but nothing about our stock of parts, how many employees we have and if we are shipping on schedule we promised. Growth = problem, at least by PayPal logic.
Fortunately we were preparing for the growths meticulously, so after all it will not hurt us from the cash flow standpoint too much but I am 100% positive that for some companies not so well prepared this would mean the end.
So my tips are:
- Always have more payment processors – if you rely solely on PayPal, even though it is very comfortable, sooner or later you will have the same thing happening to you. It was comfortable for us as it is not easy to get a US processor from Europe, but we’ll move away as fast as possible.
- If you are using PayPal, transfer the funds to your bank account as often as possible and have a backup processor prepared.
- PayPal is not your partner but a potential problem. It happened to many companies before and it will eventually happen to you too.
Bonus fun facts:
- They kept telling us on the phone “it is for your own good”.
- They didn’t get back to us for 2 weeks already.
- You don’t even get to know the sure name of the people you are dealing with, not to mention direct contact to them.
Updated 28th December 2016
Right after publishing the original post, we got contacted by Indian hacker who knows recipe how to release locked funds instantly 🙂 We did not take his offer.
Our article got published on all 3D printing news websites and generated a lot of traction. Next day after this publicity, new PayPal account manager contacted us. We even know the full name and have direct phone contact. WOW!
We got roughly 1/3 of our funds unlocked, basically all the transactions which have already been shipped. Same will apply to the rest of the funds.
We finally got Adyen (used by Uber, Airbnb, Netflix and others) set up as second payment processor for US and if it will prove itself we will turn off the PayPal. Adyen doesn’t force us to convert everything to czech crowns with bad exchange rate and allows for other payment methods as Giropay in Germany.
I totally agree with you on this. Paypal needs some significant competition before they will start to be more seller friendly. I’ve been using Stripe and have been very happy. But I think they are still very small by comparison.
I ordered my printer before all this and have been talking it up to all the makers around here. Loving it. Thank you for all the excellent details you have put into this product.
I think this is one reason sites like http://www.paypalsucks.com/ are so popular.
Honestly PayPal doesn’t care. They just don’t. Unless your revenue exceeds theirs you’re small potatoes and they don’t care how their black box policies affect you.
Hopefully this gets resolved quickly, but the odds of that happening are dwindling as we approach the US holiday season. Unless something happens soon it might now be fixed until after the new year… I hope it does, I have a Prusa MK2 ordered myself!
Funny, I remember reading the same thing happened to MakerBot back in the day.
Would it make any sense for the customers to complain about this, I would do it directly!
It’s for your own good? More like there own good. The interest accrued on a million dollars over a couple of months gives them a nice chunk of change by doing nothing more than refusing to release the money.
Imagine how much they make by floating a million on short term investments yeilds. I’m sure they have a crafty investment department driving this.
This design is incredible! You most certainly know how to keep a reader entertained.
Between your wit and your videos, I was almost moved to start
my own blog (well, almost…HaHa!) Excellent job. I really enjoyed what you had to say, and more than that,
how you presented it. Too cool!
PayPal is terrible. Despite it being founded by a great guy (libertarian Peter Thiel), it automatically confiscates any money that it suspects might be involving gun sales, even though they’re perfectly legal here in the US.
You should consider accepting bitcoin through processors such as bitpay. https://bitpay.com/
You should start accepting bitcoin… You’re breathing open source why not use open source money! Let me be the first one to pay in BTC
Because the current epidemic is still very serious,so in order not to delay students ‘ studies, many colleges and universities have launched a variety of online courses, which also to a large extent promote the online courses on behalf of students The industry is booming.So how should I look at the net class?
Net class as a new thing, in the beginning stage will be subject to great resistance.But the trend of the times is irreversible, although in the course of the implementation of online courses, whether from the school or to the individual students, have been under great pressure, but from the point of view of innovative teaching methods, online courses still have a lot of room for development.Net class breaks the limitations of time and space, allowing knowledge to spread to every corner of the world through the Internet,but at the same time for some old teachers there will be some difficulty in operation, and these difficulties will be solved with the passage of time, I believe that the future of net class is still worth looking forward to.
Thanks for information!
PayPal is a popular payment method for many e-commerce websites because it is fast, easy to use and has a good reputation. However, PayPal can be unreliable and unstable for some businesses.
Merchants who use PayPal as their primary payment option may face a significant amount of financial risk. If any of the following events happen, they could be blocked from receiving money:
If you do not comply with their terms and conditions
If your account is classified as high-risk or an account that has been heavily used
If you report issues with your account to customer service after being instructed not to contact customer service
For those businesses who rely on PayPal as their primary payment method. My https://12hoursessay.com/ writing service also encountered a paypal block.
Well, I use PayPal for my business and I didn’t get any issues like that till now. But it’s also very scary if it happened. I generally use Paypal at casinos and you can click here to know which casinos accept Paypal. Within a week I normally go there 2 times with my friends.
Thanks for the information.