I think the fascinating bit is that ebay locked down his account to "verify they were actually his to sell."
Which seems an awful lot like "we're just going to, uh, you know, hang on to the ~$28,000 you just made. For a couple of months."
Was he still responsible for shipping the orders while they held onto his money? Not everyone can afford to just shovel out the shipping and labor needed to do that.
Has anyone been through this who will talk about what it involved?
Years ago I set up a business PayPal account after selling through my personal for years. After taking orders, I pulled in $13k in a few days and went to pay my suppliers, only to find PayPal had frozen my account for suspected fraud. I had already provided all the tax information and so on, but they insisted on freezing my account for 12 months!
Magnanimously, they allowed me to withdraw $300 per month. After 6 months, PayPal let me take out 600 per month.
In the end it took 2 years to get the money out, and I shut down the account and never touched a PayPal merchant account again.
In the meantime, I kept my business going by selling through Stripe and front loading enough sales to ship the orders for the earlier customers. Was a fun time!
So while it wasn't through eBay, like this seller, I would say he's very fortunate to reach someone in support there with a brain and common sense.
Author here. I didn’t talk about this in detail in the piece out of respect to James, but long story short, it was messy. But on the other hand, it gave him a chance to ship the sudden backlog of units he had (560 units in three days!).
He did sell the devices on his website in the meantime.
Which seems an awful lot like "we're just going to, uh, you know, hang on to the ~$28,000 you just made. For a couple of months."
Was he still responsible for shipping the orders while they held onto his money? Not everyone can afford to just shovel out the shipping and labor needed to do that.
Has anyone been through this who will talk about what it involved?