In other words, learn to walk before you run.

Main advantage is that it takes minutes to set up. I used it as an instant means to get our shop online and taking orders, but I intend to graduate to something with more functionality once I have the time to learn the more advanced techniques necessary.

Here’s what they did to me:

They froze my merchant account, without warning or reason, right at the height of the shopping boom only days before Christmas. Over $12,000 of my money is now frozen in this account and they won’t give it back for, they say, SIX MONTHS. During the time the account is frozen, I am unable to receive money, send money, transfer money, or even issue refunds to my customers. They have essentially put me out of business, because of course, not only are my future customers not able to buy anything from me, but my existing customers who want refunds for items they returned or cancelled hate me because I can’t send refund their purchases.

The only correspondence I can get from PayPal about this is a series of form letters that don’t relate to my specific issue at all. If I call the customer support number (not toll-free of course to further gouge me), after lengthy hold times, poor voice recognition software, and a few transfers to different departments, I finally talk to someone who tells me to send an e-mail to a certain address.

I do as instructed, but the e-mail comes back undeliverable “You can’t send e-mails to this address” it says. I call back, and am told the same exact thing. I demand to speak to somebody else because this doesn’t work, and I’m told they don’t take phone calls – you have to e-mail. They finally divulge a second e-mail address I can use. I try it, it comes back with a form letter response, and I never hear anything else.

This continues for a month or so, every day, with dozens upon dozens of faxes, e-mails, phone calls, all at my expense, and countless misinformation and dead-ends. Finally I receive an e-mail that says “Your appeal has been denied. We’re holding your money for 180 days and then we’re closing your account”.

Later, my personal e-mail account was also seized (another $350 or so in their pocket) citing “You are too high risk” – what is high-risk about a personal account? This is total BS.

I later read on such good resources as http://www.paypalsucks.com that this is common practice for PayPal – what they do is invest your money that they’ve stolen from you and receive a return on it while you are unable to access it. With so many customers, they get big bucks from fraudulent practices such as these, and they don’t care at all about how many people’s businesses and lives they ruin in the process.

Check out http://www.paypalsucks.com, http://www.paypalwarning.com, and http://www.aboutpaypal.org and read dozens and dozens of other stories like mine. Or just search for “PayPal sucks” and see that you find 708,000 results on Google.

Stay away from PayPal if you value your business, your good name, and your money. If this hasn’t happened to you yet, it will.