Ask HN: What to do when PayPal disables your account for no reason?

I never keep more than $1000 in PayPal. It is not a bank, and is not held to the same regulatory requirements.

This cannot be posted more and high enough; never use PayPal as a merchant! Don’t keep money there and just use it to buy things, or just don’t use it at all. It is and has always been an awful company.

Depending where you are and your revenue, use an acquirer or local processing partner directly. Integration will be a little more painful, but with many benefits; cheaper and human support. In NL Mollie never failed me. I have used Ogone as well; they have been taken over a long time ago, but the support was still excellent 5 years ago.

1. When we (we didn’t know) were using it 15 years ago we were making well over a million/year in the gaming market and they locked our money for no reason. If you have to buy inventory (which we did; our profit margin was ~10%) as a startup, which we were, this can very easily kill you. And you cannot reason with them.

2. When I tried to cancel my business account (20 years old) a few years ago, it took 2 years and 100 telephone calls and emails; they said I could not cancel it because my company still was trading. They added (somewhere in 20 years) the wrong company number to the account (not my company; not sure what abuse and hell I could’ve caused these people as companies are held to standards over here). After 2 years of phone calls and emails, the last email I received was ‘sorry, but you cannot use PayPal anymore and your account has been deactivated because your company seems not to exists’. It would be hilarious if this was a 2 person startup trading a few million$; instead it’s a 31k employee and 76b$ asset company and a complete shitshow. Not sure what they do all day besides counting dollar bills. No one can be proud to work there anyway.

Stripe seems to rapidly go there now. Anyone up for starting something that makes this payments stuff fun and human again? I have the contacts.

Yeah PayPal is a mess.

I have no idea what it would take the start something to make payments better and easier to deal with. I’m down to help out; my wife (cpa cma finance) is probably going to pick apart any business plan that involves financial transactions.