There is a lot of chatter, confusion and fear online in regards to PayPal cracking down on thousands of accounts – limiting or completely freezing accounts.
There seem to be absolutely no rhyme or reason for this sort of aggression and disruption to regular people’s finance and financial tool.
It seems that they are targeting the entire “Internet Marketing Niche” and “Work at Home Niche” with these sudden bans and suspensions.
You do not have to be a site/business owner to have this happen to you. I have read numerous reports of consumers being limited or banned as well.
In fact, some of the sites I use on a regular basis for advertising and freelancing work have also come under PayPal’s wrath.
They’re not the first, and they certainly won’t be the last. Paypal has been heavily targeting tons of marketers and program owners in the past several months, but they have accelerated their “ban hammer” in the past 3 days.
What does it all mean and what do we do now?
Basically, we marketers have been too dependent on PayPal for too long. We never looked for or developed alternatives to our payment gateways and systems. It is high-time we wake up and do something about it.
We can no longer sit idle and have no backup for our most important online activity – receiving and paying funds.
What we should be doing now is develop our business around more than one payment processor. You can certainly still use PayPal but I do recommend you to also use other payment processors as a backup for if/when PayPal completely shuts you off.
Here are some current good alternatives to PayPal you should consider also using:
We have to change. Everyone in our niche is now scrambling to find alternatives and quickly develop support for them. We as marketers relied upon Paypal only, for far to many years. We got a bit lazy to be honest.
Why is Paypal doing this?
As I said earlier, their is no rhyme or reason to it. They send canned emails to people when they do it, and the emails basically say the same thing, no matter what the business model is. They offer very little in the way of explanation and require LOTS of tedious and burdensome work to try and get your account “unbanned”. Many people are not successful in lifting the ban.
I’ve seen this happen before, years ago with Stormpay, which was an extremely popular payment processor. It basically vanished over night. Some of you long timers like us may remember them. I personally lost over $7,000 when they cut my access off to my account.
In the coming weeks you will hear many peoples opinion about why Paypal is doing this, but nobody really knows except Paypal. It honestly seems like they are trying to get rid of the entire “make money at home” niche. All of us. That’s just our opinion though. We don’t have any proof of that.
Whats the solution?
We keep moving forward..
1. Stop using Paypal, at LEAST for online marketing, and transfer most of your funds back to your bank. Before they limit you or freeze your account.
2. If you haven’t already… sign up some of the alternative payment processors mentioned above. Follow their verification process, just like you did with Paypal when you signed up with them. Open a business account with them. Its free to do.
As with any payment processor, sometimes the verification process can be a little tricky. Just do it… unless you do not want to make money online anymore? Change is inevitable at times..