My Bad Experience In Setting Up A PayPal Business Account

May 24, 2017

It’s been over a month now since I posted any update on my journey into eCommerce and building eCommerce stores. It has not been a smooth one.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve built a couple of Shopify stores. Since I’m not in the USA, but that is where my target audience is, the easiest payment processor to use is PayPal. The 100k Factory Revolution course I’m following recommends setting up a PayPal Business Account rather than using a Personal Account because I am supposed to be building a business after all.

Basically, PayPal needs to verify you and your business (I have a registered business name), so it involves sending in ID, address verification info and business info.

Setting up the PayPal Business account was simple enough. But looking around the account options, I came across this – the Lift limits and move money more easily link on my account setup page (click the images below for to see larger versions):

What limits? I wondered.

Clicking that link took me to a page with this information:

Well, I guess they need a bit more verification info, I thought, so I selected the limit and clicked the Lift Limits button and was taken to this page:

I was able to enter all the required info though PayPal has since forgotten or lost my Proof of Address between when I submitted that info and writing this post.

A Big Problem

Now it turns out that PayPal will not accept any changes I make to my Personal Information. I though initially it was an issue with an incorrectly formatted phone number or it wasn’t accepting my postal code. Nothing I did made any difference. All changes to Personal Information was rejected.

Strike #1

I emailed them about this and got a stock reply that was useless.

Strike #2

I then phoned them, talked to someone who stepped through the screens and settings with me, and what became apparent was that the screens and options I was seeing were different from what she was seeing. She didn’t know why that was! One of the things she needed me to do was select a “Limited Business” as the business option. There was no such option on the screen I was looking at.

She then said she’d send me an email requesting the information they needed so they could manually update my account from their end.

No email arrived that day, but one did come into my Inbox the following morning. It wasn’t the email I was expecting. What I got was the same stock instructions I’d received before, from someone other than the woman I had spoken to.

Strike #3

I replied to the email outlining the phone conversation, went over everything again, pointing out that I couldn’t make the changes PayPal were requesting as the options to do so weren’t on the admin screens.

The email was bounced. Despite not being a “noreply” address and there being nothing in the PayPal email about replies to it not being accepted, that email box didn’t accept replies.

So the chain of communication was broken.

Strike #4

I then had to log back into my PayPal account, send off another email to PayPal via their webform, outlining everything for a third time and castigating them for their appalling support.

A day layer I got a response…

The same stock response email I’d already received twice.

Shameful Customer Support

PayPal have the worst customer support I have ever come across. There’s no ticket system so both parties can keep track of communications. Every time you deal with them, you engage with a different person. No one on their end takes responsibility for resolving issues.

So that leaves me with a broken business account that I cannot set up correctly without direct manual intervention from PayPal, which they have been incapable of doing due to a level of incompetence that is astounding.

And, because I cannot set up this account correctly, there is an annual transaction limit of $2,794 on it. Once that amount of money moves in and out of the account, it will get frozen and become completely useless.

What a great way to treat your business customers.

I’d urge anyone who’s set up a Business Account to see if your own account is subject to being limited and, if so, to check if you can complete the business account setup yourself.

I’ll probably have to resort to using a PayPal Personal Account which doesn’t present all these hoops to jump through just to have an account that I can use without limits. All because PayPal can’t get their act together.

If you’ve set up a PayPal Business Account, I’d love to hear about your experience in setting up that account, good or bad. Please leave a comment below.