Let me start off by saying thank you! In about 10 hours you all did what we couldn’t do in 10 days. At a little after 2am EST PayPal reversed the bans on the NameBio account as well as all of our personal accounts. Vindication!
I’m truly humbled by the outpouring of support. All of the retweets and shares affirming that we are a legitimate business, and not the criminals that PayPal treated us like. All of the likes and comments to boost the visibility. The blog posts helping to raise awareness. All of the personal emails of support and encouragement. The way you all rallied to stick up for us means the world to Adam and I.
It feels odd being happy, after having to fight so hard just to get back to where we started. And it was a little bittersweet to reinstall PayPal as a payment option when I’m not enthusiastic about doing business with them after this fiasco.
But the reality is that PayPal has become so ubiquitous and so powerful that it is difficult to live without them. So here we are, glad to be back with a company that just dumped us like a bad habit after a combined 34 years of being good customers, and then wouldn’t listen to reason. What a strange world we live in.
I’ll admit they do have a great product; we’ve always been happy PayPal users until now. But they need to do some serious soul searching regarding how they treat their customers. We are not the first PayPal horror story and we definitely won’t be the last. Thankfully we were fortunate enough to have an army of kind people willing to go to bat for us, but not everyone is so lucky.
PayPal needs to talk to their customers as part of their investigations before banning them, as they can’t pretend to understand every industry and every business model. They need to have higher quality and better trained staff reviewing what the bots flag as suspicious. They need to have an appeal process that doesn’t take place in the court of social media. And they need to start respecting their customers.
Anyway, at least we all learned something from this. To not leave any money in your PayPal account no matter how convenient it is, because when they come for you they’ll lock up your funds for an unconscionable six months. To be extremely careful what you put in your transaction descriptions, because what you say can be used against you in a kangaroo court. And to just not trust PayPal in general, because they don’t care about you and they don’t value your business, no matter how much you’ve done with them or for how long.
Thanks again to all of you who refused to stand idly by while we were being steamrolled! And thanks to the mysterious PayPal employee who finally saw the light. Hopefully this is the last blog post I ever have to write about PayPal.
Dear Michael Sumner,
Thank you for contacting PayPal regarding the recent limitation of your PayPal account.
We have further reviewed your case and determined that your account is currently not in violation of our Acceptable Use Policy. As such, the limitation on your account has been lifted.
We sincerely appreciate your business and offer our apologies for any inconvenience this disruption in service may have caused.
In the future, if you have any questions regarding what items are prohibited under PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy, the complete PayPal Acceptable Use Policy can be found by clicking Legal at the bottom of any PayPal page.
Thank you for your cooperation in the resolution of this matter.
Sincerely,
PayPal
Michael Sumner is the CEO of NameBio.com. Previously he was the lead developer at State Ventures which owns and operates geo domains such as OceanCity.com and Maryland.com. Michael was also the co-founder of DN Media, a company that was involved in seven figures worth of domain name transactions.
This is our society these days, guilty until proven innocent. Congrats.
Congratulations Michael and Adam. As an online service, it is important to have PayPal as a payment provider and it is nice that your efforts to get back to using them has been successful. Best wishes.
Phew! Nice to hear it all turned out okay in the end.
Glad it worked out Michael. More power and success to you and Namebio!
“We sincerely appreciate your business and offer our apologies for any inconvenience this disruption in service may have caused.”
Oh well see they apologized so everything is ok now….sad.
Honestly, I think the real lesson here is don’t rely on PayPal. I dumped them years ago for Stripe and haven’t looked back. Gives me more control, I don’t have to request transfers to my bank account every so often, because unlike PayPal, Stripe doesn’t try to act like a bank and hold my funds there. Support is also top notch, something that can never be said of PayPal.
They may be the de-facto standard for payments online, but not the only option, or the best option. Just like GoDaddy is the de-facto standard for domain registrations but is neither the only registrar nor the best.
If you own any stock/shares of PayPal, then sell all of your stock-holdings.
This company is crap.
Let them feel the pain.