As some of you are painfully aware, Shopify's partnership with Paypal on the back end has caused some issues with payouts. Now, on the back end, Shopify payments are handled with either Stripe, or Paypal (which you can see in an individual order if you expand the payment details, the paypal ones include "paypal.api" or some line like that).
Now, only payments that go through Stripe abide by the payout schedule we chose. We are associated with a university, meaning we abide by state and university policies. The fact that we can't do monthly payouts has created an administrative nightmare. It's also creating a problem with refunds - It is a non negotiable rule that we can't allow Shopify to make withdrawals from our linked bank account. This means that if we issue a refund and it exceeds that day's payout (which is not predictable), they attempt to withdraw the amount owed from that bank account. This, of course, fails, which causes our payouts to start failing. After many chats, I finally was connected to someone with their finance department. The fix of removing and rea adding the bank info did trigger the payouts to go through. However, we cannot do this every time due to the overhead it causes for our accounting department.
I'm aware that at least now, Shopify is saying that a linked bank account that allows withdraws is required. We absolutely can't do that. The fact that the payouts are not accurately predictable, and we would have to manually go into each order to tell which payout it will be included with, means that even the cumbersome process of "timing" the refunds to be on days with enough being paid out isn't doable. There is also the issue of what if this happens during a slow period? It's not reasonable to make the customer wait past a certain point.
It doesn't sound like Shopify will allow us to instead have a refund deducted from our linked credit card that we pay for our monthly apps with. They also told me that using Shopify Balance isn't something to look into as we are not eligible. If all of this does not change, we won't really have a choice except to pull out of Shopify...which was a huge migration from WooCommerce a couple of years ago for us. I'd really rather it not come to that.
As a band aid, we would at least need a way for any refunds that exceed payouts to be taken from that linked credit card, not a bank account. It seems kind of wild to me that so many merchants would have direct bank account access out there like that.
My impression is that Shopify has no intention of fixing the payout frequency issue. There were threads from October where they said it would be fixed in a few weeks and it isn't. Am I missing something major here? Is it really impossible to have ALL payouts happen at once monthly now? That is really what we need - on the monthly schedule we always earned enough for the refund/bank account thing to be a nonissue. Is there any way to get back to this happening? Shopify wouldn't even acknowledge the problem until I spelled out that I understood what was going on already and just was after an answer to will they fix it. This was a pretty disastrous rug pull for us.
My only other thought was potentially moving off of Shopify Payments. Are they any alternative payment processors that would allow our payout schedule to fully be monthly again? I've been trying to look on my own but it's not clear to me, especially since search engines have so many results are about the Shopify setting that paypal api payments don't abide by. Is this something anyone else has managed to do?
Thanks in advance for any help and for reading through the problem - I can't really get it across without a lengthy explanation about some of the unique to being a state agency issues.
