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Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't matter because only an idiot would let PayPal hold any amount of their funds.

PayPal will arbitrarily freeze your funds, suspend your account, and anything else they can get away with with absolutely no quick recourse on your end.

Use PayPal as a payment system and immediately yank the funds out. Anything else is ferociously stupid.

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According to the article customers are holding $36B on PayPal. Temporarily or otherwise, it adds up.

It seems reasonable to hold a small amount of money there for "operating capital", knowing it could disappear, just as you could lose your wallet. I'm sorry if you consider that ferociously stupid.

I think for a normal customer that's true. IIRC it's mostly commerical users who don't always seem to have immediate access to funds?

If you accept payments via Paypal you can't withdraw money for 21 days, at least that is the case in the company I work for. Explanation is that in case a dispute will be issued so that they can refund, so my guess is large proportion of those funds is such payments being held.

Ah, thanks, that's what I had in mind :) So while the original advise holds, commercial users are locked out of three weeks of payments of they're frozen for random bs.

I think it depends on the country your business is in (i.e. local laws and regulations) and what is your transaction volume is through Paypal, if you have large transaction volume I am pretty sure you will get better conditions.

Our company has very low volume through Paypal, we only provide it as a convenience and we had to limit payment amount due to fraud we had in the past, so these are likely the worst conditions you can possibly get.

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