Paypal Ebay Transaction Payments Being Held For 21 Days

by wombat

PayPal and Ebay launch 21 day funding hold to all Ebay sellers for PayPal transactions. This fact is in place wheather you have been a sucessful seller with them for years, never had an issue with your account or simply are a new user. The fact that the account is Premier or verified also has no bearing on this decision. The wording in the email is vague and can easily make you freak out or want to go through the roof.

“We're writing to let you know about a change to your PayPal account.
Starting 8/18/2011, money from payments you receive will be placed in a pending balance for up to 21 days. By doing this, we're making sure that there's enough money in your account to cover potential refunds or claims.
Even though you can't access the money right away, please ship orders quickly and communicate with your customers. After 21 days, you can withdraw money from each payment as long as the customer hasn't filed a dispute, chargeback, claim, return, or reversal.
The money may be available sooner if:
1. We can confirm that the item was delivered.
2. Your buyer leaves positive feedback. (Applies only to eBay items)
This change isn't necessarily permanent. We'll review your account every 35 days and re-evaluate if we should continue to hold your payments. If we decide to stop holding payments, we'll email you to let you know.

Why are my payments being held?
We reviewed your account and determined that there's a relatively higher than average risk of future transaction issues (such as claims, or chargebacks, or payment reversals). We understand that it may be inconvenient to have your payments temporarily held but please know that we didn't make this decision lightly. “

View the full email by clicking on the image.

The section that speaks about why the funds are being held (“We reviewed your account and determined that there's a relatively higher than average risk of future transaction issues (such as claims, or chargebacks, or payment reversals”) states that esentially you have done something wrong to have the action taken against you. Knowing that we had an excellent customer and transaction history this really pissed me off so I decided to call PayPal Customer service. When I called I immediately asked for a supervisor to speak to. The supervisor reviewed our account and stated that it was in excellent standing however, this was being done with all PayPal accounts that were also associated with an Ebay Seller account. He made some general reference to the idea of reminding Sellers of the PayPal buyer protection through holding funds for 21 days. They still want you to ship items right away and submit tracking when it is shipped to help speed up the release of the funds. This gives a seller yet one more task to do. The PayPal supervisor stated that this hold exists on the account for 30 days after which time it will be lifted if there is not issue with the account. I am not sure if I buy this idea so I will wait to see how it shakes out. . He still never gave us any good reason why the email was phrased the way it was.

I wonder how much interest PayPal can gain by holding the funds for millions of sellers worldwide for 21 days

What You Need to Know- According to Paypal Customer Service Supervisor:
Applies only to Ebay transactions
This does not apply to websites using PayPal for transactions
Does not apply to money transferred into the accout for other services or payments
Hold should come off after 30 days, if not call PayPal
Notify PayPal of tracking to speed up release of funds

Location