I’ve used eBay and Paypal for over 12 years (yes I know they are now separate), I have over 300 positive feedbacks and an average score of 4.9 on eBay. And yet yesterday, Paypal informed me that the £410 just paid to my account by a winning bidder is being held for seven days after I’ve posted the item in order to ‘check that I’m still meeting their high standards of service’.

What the f***? I mean how does putting a stop on the money acheive that let alone where the hell do they get the authority to unilaterally freeze someone’s money?

Anyone else experienced this?

Happened to me, sent them an email saying pretty much what you’ve said. Sorted that day.

Its probably in the t&cs that they periodically update but nobody reads.
Its probably something to do with not selling much in the last 6 months etc or low volume seller feedback recently

Couldnine that is what they told me also but a) I’ve completed three transactions in the last month and b) how does holding my payment back create reassurance that I’m a valid seller?

I know they are no longer one company but given that they (Paypal) have the eBay transaction number all they need to do is write a few lines of code and they would be able to automatically read my seller history through eBay.

If you think about the total volume of cash that goes through Paypal and then put a hold for seven days on say 10% of it, that’s a shit load of free cash they can create to invest in things like LIBOR. I suspect that has more to do with it than checking my credentials.

They did this to me but gave me a nominal date of 30 days regardless of feedback from the buyer. Just before xmas too. Absolute bunch of bastards, it royally screwed me over as I’d already committed to buying a new frame.

Sadly there’s nothing you can do and if you get arsey with them, they freeze your account and ban you from using it

It will make them a significant amount of cash or ease their own cash flow to take interest free loans from customers without the customers consent. The explanation is nonsense.

I severely doubt PayPal have any cashflow issues!

I blame Thatcher.

Hold X money of X people gives you X amount of money for interest and/or to show investors state of company health etc..

Because if you sent them a brick in a box, eBay (via Paypal) refund the buyer. That’s harder to do if you’ve already withdrawn it.

Don’t ever get a business credit card terminal, the terms on those would really wind you up.

I blame Bliar.

You have accepted their right to do this in the t+cs so no unilaterally. It doesn’t seem that unreasonable to me, if there is a problem with the transaction it’s PayPal refund it, which is what makes buyers feel confident using that route.

Presumably they have some filters that decide whether to do this to a specific customer transaction. If I was designing such a thing I would look at things like: whether the user has validated their PayPal account; the relative size of this transaction to others; the frequency of recent transactions; the number of payment methods on the account we could recover funds by; previous history; and perhaps things like: which IP address you’ve logged in with; how secure your password and email address appear to be; etc

Perhaps by optimising your account settings you can reduce the chance of this happening?

Could it be due to the way the customer has paid you?

I have 2 ways of paying and for some reason paying through the bank is the default and if I use this to pay then it automatically defaults to pay after delivery.

Swapping over to pay on my card and the payment to the seller is immediate.