Months ago I got an alert on Shopify stating that I had to provide certain documents in order to meet with their compliance for payments. I didn’t have documents with exactly the same names they listed but I did provide them with a larger variety of documents including articles of incorporation, proof of ownership, tax filing documents, bank statements, local business license, utility information, drivers licenses for myself and my husband as well as other documents. Basically each time I was rejected I tried a different document hoping to prove to shopify we had a legitimate, incorporated and tax abiding business. Other then a message stating that some of the documents were not issued within the 6 month time span they required (which isn’t possible for many documents) I had no other information from them. Then, a couple months ago, they put up a message stating that too many attempts had been made with the document uploads and I would have to contact Customer Support. I contacted support who said that it would be escalated. I never heard back. I have since contacted them at least 3 more times, each time being told that it would be escalated but never hearing back and the ability to upload new documents still blocked.
On the Local Global TV two nights ago Shopify was profiled about this exact issue. That business wasn’t able to get payment for over a month. Until that report I didn’t think they would ever hold our funds.
The message on our site yesterday was that if I didn’t provide the correct documents within four days they would stop issuing the funds. But, I am still blocked from uploading documents and customer support didn’t help. As a result I took a big step and disabled Shopify payment processing on our online store. I have put up a message asking customers to please use Paypal (which approved all my business credentials within a day), eTransfer or to call us with a credit card so we can process it in our physical store (which fortunately does not use Shopify payments). This new payment limitation will likely result in some lost sales. But the alternative of not receiving any funds is not an option.
Our next step is to talk to our CFIB rep (Canadian Federation of Independent Business) to see if they can help lobby on our behalf. I have had no success with going through Shopify support. Has anyone else encountered this issue where they ask you to provide documents then block you from uploading? I’d really like some additional suggestions as to how to resolve this. Shopify payments is easy for our staff to use and I paid for a higher level plan in order to get good rates. I’d rather not change to a different merchant account.