Quickbooks Closed My Merchant Account Yesterday | Perfect Example of Why Cryptos Are Necessary
Quickbooks Closed My Merchant Account.
Okay so I know that most of you are on Steemit so you're probably already interested in and supportive of blockchain technology, decentralization and cryptocurrencies so in a sense I'm preaching to the choir here. That said I think it's important to highlight real life examples of why there's this need.
So my eCommerce business is in a "high risk" industry. For any of you who aren't aware some completely normal and legal businesses are considered to be "high risk" and essentially blackballed from payment processing. Some types are obvious like if your selling bongs or weed pipes however if you look at Paypal or Stripe , or really any processors list of prohibited businesses I think you'd be surprised by many somewhat normal businesses that have an impossible time finding processing. This includes things like dropshipping businesses, eBay sellers, consultants, computer repair and many other legal and normal businesses.
For the first 3 years of my business I used Paypal. I did over 2 Million in sales per year with 0 chargebacks and few to no returns. I was an ideal client. Then one day out of the blue I get the dreaded call from Paypal's risk department. They "aren't comfortable with my volume" and are terminating my account. Because of my healthy account they were nice enough to give me 30 days to find a processor, however it wound up taking me almost 4 months and calling hundreds of merchant processors to finally find one. With that account I'm paying about 7% in merchant processing fees.
Around this time I noticed Quickbooks didn't outright ban my business type so I setup an account with them which was really not much more than one click. I was using Quickbooks and another high risk processor for about 3 years, again stellar performance, no chargebacks, etc. Yesterday I get a call out of the blue from Quickbooks and they are terminating my account. No warning time, no we'll give you til the end of the day, as of this second your account is closed. I'm still waiting to see if they actually properly batch me out and give me the money they owe me.
I know here in the Western World we are somewhat spoiled by all the banking options at our disposal, free checking accounts, debit cards, credit cards, Venmo, Paypal, Stripe, etc. It's easy to forget that much of the rest of the world is unbanked and for people not involved in eCommerce it's tough to wrap your head around the need for cryptos outside of just investing or speculating but there truly is a need.
What's really frustrating to me is my business could go under simply because Visa, Mastercard and Banks want to make my life difficult. That's what is so frustrating to me. If my business fails because I don't make sales or fail on my own merits fine I can live with that. But to fail when I have customers wanting to purchase from me, but I have no way to accept their payments is very frustrating.
I love that Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies get the banks, merchant processors and payment gateways out of the way, however unfortunately at this time they are not widely enough used to be a feasible solution.
Power must be removed from the banks and the elite, I believe crypto currency's could be one big step towards that . Cheers mike
Wow that is crazy. My business was almost derailed in a similar way. It never went quite that far but basically PayPal called me because my volume was so high and eBay did a full audit on my account and had me produce all kind of documents. I provided them with about 30 scanned in documents from receipts to electric bills....etc. I was scared I was going to lose my eBay account. Luckily I got that straightened out.
Not being able to use PayPal is pretty much a death sentence for eBay and a lot of other things.
It is ridiculous because suddenly it might cause you guys to have to try to make accounts under other names and other business entities to play a cat and mouse game which will make it look like it is shady.
That is one reason why i sometimes wonder how people get super huge without being derailed. If we are getting derailed how do these companies get to where they are doing $200 Million in sales or something?
Yeah for a while after we lost our Paypal account I got a merchant account setup and tried to use that through eBay but like you said 99.999% of eBay buyers want to pay with Paypal understandably. Most people would select to buy an item and then never follow through actually making the payment as you can't require immediate payment unless your using Paypal so had to open item not paid cases all the time. We'd have people doing chargebacks because they thought they bought something on eBay and on the credit card statement it would show my companies name. I finally just gave up on ebay for that particular business.
I've been calling around all morning and no closer to getting another account. Fortunately I still have one up adn running but in any high risk business you want 3-5 because you never know.
Hopefully crypto quickly gets more widespread and can be another option for us.
Man that sucks dude. I feel for ya. It sounds like you were thinking of getting more into the wholesaling of stuff to other sellers and now this has happened. So maybe that is an option to run a lot of the volume through other sellers who have done enough volume to not get the boot possibly.
If you run out of options perhaps we can talk about running some of the volume through my accounts if you are interested.
I'm glad I found your blog! Followed.
Great topics
Thanks @forbesi appreciate it :)
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STOPI know that feeling on PayPal. Same thing almost happened to me. I use to have some strings with PayPal back about 8 years ago. I talk to a Senior Executive and they basically told me if I kept like 30k at all times in my account based on my volume it would bring my risk level down due to their ALGO. So the past 8 years I have had a stack of Cash I can't touch and earn no interest on sitting there to appease PayPal. Then if they ever do decide to Limit my account those funds get locked for 180 days.