CherryTree Has Removed PayPal as a Payment Option

CherryTree Has Removed PayPal as a Payment Option

As of April 1st 2023, we will join the meanwhile rather long list of companies who no longer offer PayPal as a form of payment - and I want to give you a little bit more insight on why we've made this decision.

We have been offering PayPal as an additional form of payment for our customers since we founded this company in 2016. We didn't have any problems, chargebacks, fraud attempts, unauthorized changes in products or really anything negative. We all heard the horror stories from other companies about PayPal putting holds on funds for no reason, and we thought that would never happen to us. Turns out, we were so wrong.

On March 31st 2023, right after the sale of a machine we received this email here from PayPal:

“'The rest of this month’s money won’t be available right away'
We noticed you’ve made over $9,302.14 USD in sales this month. This means that for now, money from additional sales won’t be available right away.

You should have instant access to another $9,302.14 USD in sales starting next month. Keep in mind that we revisit this amount regularly, so it may change.”

Now, sales above $9,302.14 per month via PayPal is actually pretty standard for us and we usually exceed this amount by quite much - because when you think about it, this amount barely covers 2 fully configured gaming rigs. Needless to say, we were extremely surprised by this hold. We also had no idea where the chosen amount of $9,302.14 was coming from and why out of the blue they were holding funds above that amount. They had given us no prior warning, no announcements, no emails, no policy changes… nothing!

Needless to say, even though PayPal wasn’t our only payment processor, we still rely on funds from sales to cover costs of goods sold and buy inventory, make payroll, pay rent. You know, the usual things when you run a business.

I immediately sent several messages to PayPal, and of course got no reply. Near the end of the day, I informed PayPal that we would stop offering their service as a form of payment for our customers if those funds are not released within an hour. On the morning of April 1st, we still had no reply and the funds were still on hold without any explanation. So we removed PayPal from our shop.

On the morning of April 2nd, we received this message here:

“Hello and thank you for contacting PayPal. My name is Ransom. I understand that you had a payment that was on hold. The payment was released to your account earlier this morning. Thank you for contacting PayPal.”

Seems we were one of the lucky ones that had funds like this released within a few days. However, after some serious digging, we found that there are a lot of merchants out there that had funds held for up to 180 days. This is something we are absolutely not willing to risk.

On top of that, there's PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy. Among many problems with it, the policy is extremely vague in language, allowing them to freeze your funds or shut down your account at their discretion. Here are just a few articles referencing problems with this:

• How PayPal's Acceptable Use Policy Could Kill Your Business
  
  
• PayPal Removed As Payment Option | Green Iron Road Wear
  
  
• Elon Musk agrees with fmr president of PayPal on PayPal’s drastic move

Normally, we would tell you that “we’re sorry for the inconvenience,” and while those who normally use PayPal as a payment option will need to use an alternative, I will not lie to you: we are not sorry about this decision. PayPal has absolutely no right to hold funds from companies for such a prolonged time, and just because they released our funds after a couple of days doesn’t mean they won’t do this again and then hold the funds for much longer. Besides all of that, PayPal was always the most expensive payment processor we offered. We hope that you understand our decision.

LLAP,
martin roth