Paypal account closed down - what now??

Crowqueen

hermum wrote: »

OP I would try & phone Paypal, see if you can find out exactly what activity they say took place that could have caused them potential loss.
Have you ever had your ebay or Paypal restricted or closed before?
Is there anyone else linked to your account who has previously been banned?
Have you recently moved address
If ebay haven't restricted you then you can still buy as long as the seller will accept a different form of payment.
There are lots of other places to sell, Gumtree, local paper, freeads, adtrader, local Facebook selling pages, ebid.

Very few of those will make anything like what selling on eBay will - they are mostly better for unwanted items rather than making a few bob. The people who do well with those kind of sites are probably people with more time and energy than the OP has to put into marketing themselves properly and driving traffic - they cannot rely on eBay to do that for them. Additionally, because they are unable to take Paypal, some of those sites are right out - I would not buy anything on eBid, for instance, without the back-up plan of Paypal, because eBid's buyer protection on anything other than Paypal sales is rather too scanty for my liking as a buyer. That would also cut out most online sales as well - they could try Amazon or Playtrade, which have their own proprietary systems, but they would need to straighten things out with the taxman.

And being an unreg business does tally with Paypal's suspicions being raised about the account - because a sudden change in direction from a seller can ring alarm bells.

Look at it from their point of view.

Seller is trundling along, selling clothes, knick-knacks, anything they can get their hands on.

Then suddenly a box full of new items get listed. Double points if it was something like electronics (high scam area) or other relatively expensive-looking items the OP found cheap to sell on.

Paypal would look at that, go 'potential hijack, no registration on the eBay account, sudden change in volume of amounts going through account, sudden regularity of prices and payments' and think - let's investigate this one before they get out of hand and they start costing us money in refunded transactions and their buyers start to complain.

Paypal watch out for these things because they have been left holding the baby in the past. It's very unfortunate for OP but they need to work it through with Paypal. Hopefully they will get reinstated - at least before eBay take fright as well. Meanwhile I'm glad someone out there is taking account of people acting as a business while not registered as one - and maybe OP will get something out of it, sort the problems out, register themselves properly and make it into a going concern. But for the moment they have to play it very carefully.

So it's entirely plausible that OP not realising they had to register as a biz means that Paypal have pulled the plug.