All things Shopify and commerce
Up until recently, my business partner and I have loved using the Shopify platform. My partner and I come from a background of eCom and Fashion, launching a company together via Shopify a few months ago. But just when all is going well, sales growing and buzz trending, Shopify's "Risk" team hit our shop with a "HOLD", shutting down our website (without any notifications, emails, dashboard messages, etc) and withholding all payments from our customers. Now unless this has happened to you, it probably doesn't mean anything YET, but it will so keep reading, and seriously consider about moving to a new platform other than Shopify before they do the same.
So we started digging deeper into the issue and what this "hold" meant. We emailed and called Shopify's customer support "Gurus" to learn more. Apparently there is a False/Positive issue going around with Shopify where their Risk team can flag any store, falsely accusing a store as high risk, and making them having to pay more per month. Shopify told us we couldn't use their standard Shopify Payments Gateway (which comes with your membership), and instead that we must transfer to another provider, allowing Shopify to still earn the 2% per transaction, and making us, the business owners, having to pay more since we must now use another payment provider to accept credit cards for our customers during checkout.
Furthermore, researching on Google and Shopify's community forum, this has happened A LOT to new and growing businesses on Shopify. They flag a business, which according to their Terms of Service, are high risk. But if you actually read Shopify's TOS, these "high risk" businesses are classified as super shady shops, often selling harmful or illegal products. But that wasn't the case for us. We are a fashion brand selling clothing. My partner and i have spent time building ecom and fashion businesses, most recently Jet.com and other companies in New York City. Our company abides to all rules, legalities, state filings, business requirements, etc, which yours probably does to, but beware that Shopify may randomly send you a message telling you your shop is High Risk as well.
What is unfortunate is this terrible customer experience from Shopify and it’s Gurus. It is enough to make us move platforms, and unfortunate for Shopify as they lose yet another customer.
I do not know your case here so hard to comment, but from what you writing it seems very special and not acceptable. I guess you should have some warnings and explaining from Shopify as they can not just shut down peoples hard work if that is the case here.
Anyway it would be good if Shopify come on and clear out this terms for others to know.
Similar has happened on one of our shopify stores. They are asking for authorisation from two ip holders of products we sell. We buy through an authorised wholesaler so the ip holders won't supply us with docs (as we don't deal with them directly). They won't accept invoices outlining the supply source along with documents that show the wholesaler is authorised. They have had no ip complaint, there are loads of brands on this site and they have picked on two that they've heard of without justification of any sort.
To ALL,
We are having the same issue. We switched to shopify payments due to the extra 2% they were charging for the use of authorize.net. We immediately switched and were put on hold. Shopify payments is hold with 70,000 dollars of our money for 3 weeks. We have provided every form of documentation as we are a distributors that ships from our factory. They do not understand our business model at all! We are still on hold and the "guru" cannot help in anyway. You can not complain, call, email or get anyone to respond. Several of the guru's have agreed that they can do nothing. We are speaking to our attorneys to address this issue. What is worst is that we spend over 6-8 months learning the system and put 10,000 work of labor at the new website only to find out that they are crooks. We will be suing for sure regardless of the outcome.
@Chris_Ramirez This happened to me and they did not refund or pay the money from my orders, they just kept it and refused to address the issue. I have tried to contact them but I keep getting told to contact the risk team (which does not have an email or a number). Someone need to just sue them to make them understand what they are costing business owners.
Chris - have you contacted a class action attorney? You need at least 10 to file any type of suit and seeing Shopify TOS are now showing a US registered address that opens the door.
I've had my store for over three years now. Been seeing the same types of items, doing pre orders, stock, drop shipped - never an issue and now all the sudden my gateway is on hold. I can't even disconnect it because I have an outstanding Capital. Trying to get anyone to answer any emails is near impossible, there TOS also states their processor is Stripe. I've spoken to stripe directly, gave them links, showed them items and their legal is saying there is ZERO issues with my store. So if their own processor (who that is who they are blaming right now) has zero issues, and if you read the TOS it states if the "bank" "processor" has issues that's an issue, then who is really being the ass here and doing all this? The lady I got an email from was Emma and all a guru keeps telling me is its in the que to be answered. What que? I contacted an attorney that keeps tweeting to their support over same stuff. You pause my gateway you better pause every single store out there selling the same items from the same vendors I have as well. I also heard this past week pauses were due to Funko SDCC requesting large bandwidth and huge processing (as they don't use PayPal, just card processing) and even then Funko site crashed numerous times during payments and shipping screens. Anyone who had Funko on their site were paused, I don't even have them visible and I have my license with them direct. Emailed invoices and everything else, still no reply I'm about ready to lose it.
I am in on a class action lawsuit! Please message me.
How is the lawsuit going? Im looking into filing one myself as well. My shopify has been labeled high risk, they held my money, and forced me losing multiple thousands without any accountability in which they have caused.
Hello can I contact you able this!?
I’m about to start one.
holyclay03@gmail.com
Yea I agree this just happened to me as well. What’s another good platform you guys recommend? Also if you need any petitioners for your law suit you can email me here. WyzeEnterprises@gmail.com
This happened to me as well. Not only did shopify hold my payments. They deleted my store and refunded over 12 thousand dollars in purchases. This resulted in complete devastation as I had already shipped the product. Furthermore, they then took thousands of dollars out of my checking and I had to report them to my bank as fraudulent charges. All of this happened after I had been a loyal shopify customer for nearly 5 years!!!!! Never had an issue before. Their customer service is non existent and they refuse to give me an answer as to why this happened. I'm not sure if my business will ever recover.
To anyone reading this....run!!!! Rum far far away from these shopify crooks. Take your business elsewhere. If you become too successful, they will shut you down and ruin your business. Shopify is a **bleep** scam dressed up to look as a legitimate business. They do a very good job at it, but trust me and everyone else in this forum. If you succeed, they will shut you down and steal your money.
Would anyone mind sharing their lawyers information with me. I'm having problems as well. Shopify is hikdongn$12000 of my customers money and my profit from me so I can't process their orders. It's been like this for 4 months. They said on the 120th day which is June 5th 2022 they will release the money to me finally but I talked to someone from customer service last night and they said because I haven't processed any of the orders they are going to hold my money for another 90 days! I can't wait 90 more days!!! This is total bullsh**! How can people pay for customers orders when Shopify holds the customers money hostage!? They are just causing my business to fail by holding the money and they keep coming up with excuses to not release the hold for my payouts and they are blaming me for the orders not being fulfilled when it's their fault!!! This is unacceptable!!
They must be providing you with an explicit reason. It would be useful to know so that advice might be provided.
Email me when you have found a lawyer. Im looking for one too. derekdinbusiness@gmail.com
They screwed me too..asked for a bunch of documents and held my businesses money hostage for 4 months saying I needed to provide ridiculous proof of this and that and then atfter a dozen emails I sent pissed off about this they messaged me back saying they redacted their request for the documents and proof of suppliers inventory and so on bcuz the bank didn't need it to allow me to have access to the money my store made which half of that belonged to my customers who's orders I couldn't fulfill bcuz my money and their money was on hold and then after redacting the request for the documents etc they said they would be paying me out a few days later but then they decided to extend the hold another 90 days which would be a total of 7 months of not being able to process the orders or refund anyone their money. Which I exploded on them again. Sent a daily long email and even emailed the CEO with threats to suit them and told them I have my lawyer already investigating their business practices and what they may or may not be doing legally which is true. They said they were extending the hold bcuz there were a cpl charge backs and bcuz I had not refunded any of the orders I cancelled bcuz they had been flagged for high risk of fraud. But wait a second mother fuckers! That's on u idiots! I couldn't refund the money bcuz Shopify was holding all the money that came in from sales from my store they were not letting me refund anyone and they didn't go ahead and process the refunds for me which is what should have been done as soon as I cancelled them. But no they wanted to point the their dirty scammy fingers at me and put the blame onto me for this shit. So as I said I exploded again. So they lifted the hold just enough for me to refund the customers who's orders I cancelled. Well guess what! I still have 12 orders to fulfill but they are not letting me and even worse!!! Somehow I supposedly refunded $1500+ over the amount that came into my store. So now I'm negative that much...
How the **bleep** is that possible! I should have the money for the 12 unprocessed and non cancelled orders. The good orders. So how am I negative!? That is what I'm now trying to figure out.
What I want to know is does anyone know if we can move our store that we have built the online presence/website for to a different e-com company like Shopify but not Shopify? I don't want to have to recreate the whole thing. I paid someone to creat it for me. I don't have time to be building it all from the ground up again or the money to pay anyone to do it for me.
I would like to join ur lawsuit. I think everyone who has been fucked in our asses by Shopifys dirty, scammy, corrupt, bullshit, thieving pieces of shit should join forces and go in for a class action lawsuit. The more people fighting them the easier it will be to take them down or force them to change their horrible business practices. They are a bunch of evil sociopaths who are randomly picking stores to **bleep** with and the excuses they have used in my case they admitted the first ones were totally unnecessary the whole 4 months they had my money and my customers money on hold and they are 100% at fault for me not processing orders, refunding cancelled orders and getting charge backs yet they use that against me as if I'm the one who chose to run my store like that! I'm **bleep** no!!! I would never run my business like that! That's not even running a business. That's sabotaging and destroying my business, my reputation, everything, all the time and money I have spent putting it together. All of it is being destroyed by Shopify. The very company who depends on us to pay for our domains every month which pays their bills and their employees and themselves. Why would any company choose to do any of these things to people they depend on to make their pockets fatter!? It's **bleep** stupid. My advice to everyone considering opening a store on Shopifys e-commerce platform is DONT!! GO ANYWHERE ELSE BUT SHOPIFY!! THEY ARE SIRTY ROTTEN LYING THIEVES!
Same has happened to my store, they’re risk team have held our payments because we dropship some of our products and because we had two chargebacks which come from the same address we are now high risk which I don’t understand but it’s like talking to a brick wall. Coming back with the same response. I’ve explained to them I’m going into my first year of university and they’re going to place me in debt as I need to pay my supplier the money but who’s held it. We should make a group and then sue them at once especially with their cheeky replies this “risk” team.
The same happened to my store where they shut it down with no warning due to “high risk” and is hard to contact them back. They hold over $2,000 In my store that I can’t get to and as a small start up business, that’s a lot of money. And shutting the store down around the time I had buying reviewing it
The exact thing happened to me yesterday. I spent nine months designing and building the site. I have spent over $60k on the site. They completely blocked my site. I cannot accessing my assets and information to rebuild the site on a different platform. I just had one sale, and they froze it for three months. I have damaged it big time. I wrote back to them, but still no answers from them. I found a class law suite online for the same reasons. I have to do something if they don't get back to me. Anyway, I lost my trust, and I have to have a backup site even if they give my site back to me.
They did it to me today. I have a brick and mortar toy store and an online store. I was notified at 4:32 today (first contact), with a full store full of people, that I was being shut down due to copywriting infringement. Everyone's credit cards were then declined and nobody had cash so I had to shut my brick and mortar, on what is normally a very lucrative day for me—Spring break in a tourist town.
Its involved, but for instance they want me to prove I can sell Disney items, but I don't buy from Disney, I buy from people who hold the license to sell Disney: Candy, Books, Costumes, Dolls, Games, Puzzles (all from different vendors who are licensed to manufacture and sell Disney branded things). I have 14,000 items, 280 vendors—businesses and divisions have been bought and sold, sales rep groups have changed, some of my product is 4 years old, going through and figuring out where I got things is just not practical or at all realistic. Many invoices have one or two licensed items--but I can't even figure out a practical way to respond. I did my best.
Their response is ridiculous and completely unhelpful. It tells me they have no understanding of my industry, my business model, or how things work with licensing. I have not been 100% happy with them. Their tech support is not helpful for the most part when I have issues. I feel like I am talking to a pimply faced, voice-cracking teenager who can't begin to understand the complexity of questions I am asking. And after they have led me astray many times, I am lothe to trust them to not screw things up more. But I have 5 years of data invested in this company, and I just signed a contract with an agency to help me with a significant upgrade my website. I am now wondering if I want to invest any more in this platform and curious if anyone made any headway with lawyers.
They are absolutely fixated on Disney for some reason. It took almost two years to sort out and in the end we removed all references to it.
Why are you using Shopify for card payments in a f2f store??
Because I also have a website and it has been easier to have everything processed together ...
I would be happy to start a class action lawsuit against them with you Chris.
BEWARE of using shopify balance account - I had $6,000 in my shopify BANK account (not from the payouts) funds that i added from other bank accounts, Shopify randomly flagged my store for being high risk and they TOOK my shopify balance account (my bank account) and are holding it for 180 days. Not to mention, they are making me pay the fees for refunding the customers and creating a loss for me, They have also taken my ability to pay my IRS fees , state and sales tax by hijacking my bank account.
Any lawyers looking to act on this company? I have had enough!
How is it going. I am interested in joining as this same situation has happened to me. Basically screwing me over and putting me on high risk and disabling my shopify payments
Same here! Could you contact me holyclay03@gmail.com
Hi Chris, I am having the same issue and contributing a lawyer. Please reach out to me if you can. bluelakefashion949@gmail.com
Email me derekdinbusiness@gmail.com
I cannot reach your email for some reason
bumping this back up. recently had to change over to a third party payment provider. it was all cool kept making sales, now I go to stripe to get out my money and all of my sales aren't there. call stripe they tell me they see the sales and money but I have to call Shopify. I call Shopify a they tell me they I have to call stripe. so basically im fcked outta my money and sales. any one ever actually go through with the legal stuff.
Shopify Legal is incompetent, tone deaf and ignorant of . . . US case law that state First Sale Doctrine covers the legality of reselling almost any licensed, copyrighted or trademarked original product. Talk about bad business? Turning your own customers into customers of your competitors and potential plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit?
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