I’m writing this post to talk about my recent struggles with Shopify payments and their support system being absolutely useless and non transparent on what’s going on with my money.
Back on November 20th 2023 I woke up with a bright red error notification in the payouts tab with the popup reading “Your payouts from Shopify Payments are on hold while we review your account - This is a standard review, and this hold does not prevent your customers from checking out.” Originally I felt a little upset about my payments being halted, however I’ve known that payment holds/reserved funds are a standard thing while working with processors such as Stripe and Shopify payments. I figured that a staff member would look into my business and determine everything was fine or request certain documents from me. Also keep in mind that my chargeback rate was beyond compliant around 0.003% at the time.
I am more than happy to provide any documents providing details about my business however as time passed I got no request for any document as well as not a single email about this situation even informing me of a payment hold. Within the passing days I reached out Shopify support to see if we could work this situation out and I just got some generic responses saying that they are looking into it.
More time kept passing and I get no further updates. I have reached out numerous times to their support team in hopes I get some sort of update on this situation, but nope the same generic response of “our team is looking into it” every time.
It is currently February 26th and this situation first occurred on November 20th, meaning that I’ve waited over 3 months with no updates at all. Reached out multiple times to support and get ghosted every time.
I had a failed payout of around $2000 and a balance of $10,000 USD in the payouts tab which somehow no longer displayed and disappeared (I do however have a screenshot on my phone of this balance, so I know I’m not crazy). Although this may seem like a significant amount, I have accepted the fact that I most likely will never see this money.
Now my question is, is this something I can take up legally to try and recover some of my funds? This seems like absolutely criminal behavior and although I agreed to the terms of Shopify Payments because I used their service but this feels borderline illegal to not give me any update on thousands of dollars after being patient with them while waiting more than 90 days?