Without warning or a request for any documentation my Shopify payments were put on hold for non-compliance literally the DAY BEFORE Black Friday. I sell wine in gift baskets. I’m licensed to sell wine in gift baskets. I’ve been doing so for four years. I immediately submitted all required documentation. Since then - crickets. I’ve sent multiple emails asking for more information and either get a generic “we’ve reached out to our banking partner/thanks for your patience” or no answer whatsoever. You cannot contact Trust & Safety via phone. You can only chat with a rep. Those reps cannot directly connect you to Trust & Safety. There is absolutely no avenue that I have found to contact them to resolve this in a timely fashion. Meanwhile, I have been without payouts for two weeks and am at the point where I cannot meet financial obligations while Shopify sits around doing nothing/holding my money. Especially punitive during the holidays! I’m certain that the “banking partner” isn’t going to pay me the interest they earned by holding my money unjustifiably for this length of time.
I have no answers on what the process is. No answers on what happens if they decide to terminate my merchant services account. No answers on how long my payouts will be held. No answers as to whether I should switch to an alternate payment provider while this is resolved (which I asked almost immediately).
Has anyone else experienced this? Did you have any luck contacting them? If so, how? I am sick of the generic “Thanks for your patience/we take this seriously” responses when they’ve left their front line agents powerless to help. Any advice for workarounds? Obviously during the holidays I’m not in a position to change my Platform to another provider. PayPal is problematic because I collect custom information in my checkout/deliveries go to a different person than the purchaser (I’m primarily a florist).
So incredibly frustrated and am in real danger here of damaging relationships if I cannot meet financial obligations due to this. Please help!!!
I am in the same boat and no one seems to care. This business is what feeds my family. I’ve contacted support everyday and it’s the same blah, blah, blah. Today I contacted the BBB and filed a complaint. I also filed a complaint with the Attorney General’s office in my state. I will get an answer one way or the other.
I received my email on 11/30 at which time they also stopped my payouts. I immediately replied to the email with the invoices (per their request). On 12/5 they shutdown my website. Today it is still shutdown. I have not been able to get a hold of anyone at Shopify so I’m trying alternative methods. BTW, I am considering a class action lawsuit. In my opinion, this is completely unacceptable. If they do not have the staff to review the documentation in a reasonable amount of time, they should not be shutting down websites or holding our payouts.
I’m sorry to hear you’re in the same boat as me. Keep me updated if you get a resolution and I will do the same.
Thanks for the info. Weirdly I suddenly have a “failed” payout attempt with a notice that my payouts are on hold until I resolve the (non) issue with my bank. My last payout was November 23rd. They have not shut down my site fortunately but this “failed” payout is super weird. And also not for the whole amount - only the next one in line.
Thank you so much for sharing your feedback in our community forums about this process. I fully understand how urgent it is for you to get this resolved.
To confirm, you are using Shopify Payments for your business and are located in the USA? Our banking partners can initiate a review at any time during a businesses relationship with Shopify and Shopify Payments. In the case of selling alcohol products while accepting payment through the Shopify Payments gateway, there are certain documents and attestations that will be required.
There is no guaranteed turn around time in reviewing these cases. We do recognize the impact having a payout hold can have an on a business and we strive to handle all cases like this with a high priority. We can only move as fast as our banking partners allow us.
You can absolutely use an alternate payment gateway on your business while this review is happening. If you are disabling Shopify Payments, please make sure to reply back to your open ticket about this and let them know that you wish to continue with the review while the gateway is disabled.
Thanks for your help. Honestly this is the most coherent response we’ve received thus far on the issue.
Yes, I am located in the USA. My account has been open 4 years and I clearly passed the initial review when my account was opened. No secret about my activities.
I get that a review can be initiated at any time. My complaint is with the execution. The day before Black Friday, no warning - just payouts on hold. No merchant should be left with their livelihood in the balance - especially at the most critical financial time of the year - because these reviews are not happening in a timely and clearly outlined process. Most of my emails to Trust & Safety have gone unanswered - including one explaining my circumstance and asking whether it would go on so long that I should switch from Shopify payments temporarily. Never answered my questions - just auto-reply “we’ve reached out to our banking partners”. Chat unable to help at all. Had I known it would drag on, I would have switched to a different payment provider two weeks ago. That’s all that I am asking for here - transparency and accountability. For my questions to actually be answered.
How ironic that once the complaints were filed with the AG and BBB yesterday, my website was turned back online last night. I don’t want to be the squeaky wheel, but if that’s the only way to get some grease, then so be it. Merry Christmas…seems like we’re both back in business.
I am in a similar situation. I’ve been selling wine since 2020 without any issues. Then suddenly on 12/2/23, Shopify said they were doing their compliance review and may disable Shopify Payments and they put my payouts on hold.
Despite my providing them with all the necessary documentation, they disabled Shopify Payments on 12/4. They thankfully released a payout that was on hold though. I have tried contacting support by phone, and I have emailed both Legal and Risk Management departments with no response. The customer support reps can’t do anything and just say wait for the review to be complete.
In the meantime, I have been trying to get an account with Bankful set up and it takes several days. This is such a critical time for my business and I can’t be without an adequate payment provider since we do POS sales at weekly tasting events. I lost customers at an event last night since they are used to just tapping their cards on my card reader or using Apple Pay. My trying to get customers to pay via PayPal or Venmo makes me look very unreputable.
My business has taken a significant hit this week and I see from these comments that may not change. I don’t want to resort to filing complaints on the BBB site. It looks like my business needs to finally make the switch to WineDirect, which is what Shopify appears to be pushing businesses like ours to do.
So glad they opened the site back up for you, but they won’t compensate us for any lost proceeds during the time they are completing the reviews. Not having adequate warning time to establish an alternative payment method is unacceptable and detrimental. This needs to be resolved quickly and I’ll see to it that it never happens again.
Now I’m getting the runaround from Risk Management. They responded today and asked for some of the same items I already submitted to them that were included together in the SAME submission, like they only received part of the information. I immediately sent the info again. We’ll see how long they keep this charade going. This is extremely unfair for folks like me who are running small businesses and I’m complying with everything they ask for, but still having my business impacted negatively no matter what I do. Shopify has set us up for failure - purposely conducting these ‘reviews’ exactly when sales should be most lucrative and when we’re all just trying to make it every day in a tricky economy with high inflation.
They did the same thing to me. I sent the information three times and finally I drew red arrows to the products they were questioning and sent them again. The irony of this whole situation is that they requested the receipts for the copyrighted products, but couldn’t figure out how to actually read the receipt they requested.
Yes, for me it has been. Once someone in Trust & Safety started actually working with me and on it I had resolution in two days. Payouts were held from November 23rd until I finally started receiving them again this week on December 11th.
Are you still waiting for resolution? Mine was finally resolved after a senior Shopify advisor on chat got involved. My husband started chats several times a day until we finally got someone who properly escalated it. Once I had a person assigned to my case it went quickly. He told me what I needed to do and got the waiver I needed from Stripe approved. Just silly that these cannot be resolved in a timely fashion for everyone. We’re looking at a different solution after the holidays. I like a lot of things about Shopify but I just need to admit I need a more functionality/a more custom site and cannot afford Shopify Plus. This was the push I needed.
Many thanks for your response. As a small business owner I’m excited to hear that you got your payouts. There aren’t many users claiming they had their payouts reopened with a couple weeks.
I wondering if I could give you my background and ask a couple questions? My shop is an official and authorized retailer of running shoes, apparel, gear and nutrition. I will gross about $700,000 in 2023 using Shopify POS and Shopify Online sales.
I received an email from risk-management@shopify.com on 12/14/23 that payouts were on hold due to having branded products on my site. I have authorization from all brands and sent the maximum of 5 invoices on the link provided in their email.
I then responded to the original email with over 100 invoices from brands I sell.
I’m curious to know if you had responded to either of those emails or if it was different?
I received an email response the next day on 12/15/23 from risk-management@shopify.com that the information had been sent to their banking partners for review. Was this something you received?
With that said it appears that you received notification of 11/24/23 and from that date until sometime after 12/6/23 you heard nothing from them?
After risk management began speaking to you what happened in those conversations? Did you provide additional documentation?
I realize this is a lot to ask but I believe if business owners like you and I can provide others with a more efficient pathway for success there will be less negative impacts.
No worries at all. I am happy to share my experience if it helps anyone else. It is ridiculous to stop payouts pending review if there is not a team to actually take care of the reviews in a timely fashion. In my opinion, they could resume payouts once seeing your documentation if the situation was simply a matter of submitting required paperwork. This could (and should) also happen on the front end when you activate Shopify payments initially. Give merchants an obvious and easy way to submit required documentation. It would greatly reduce this issue. Obviously reviews happen. I expect that.
I initially received notice on 11/24 that I had violated terms of service and was referred to the proper section of the agreement. I sell wine in my gift baskets and apparently you need a waiver to do so even though there really isn’t an avenue to request one when you activate Shopify payments to my knowledge.
I immediately replied to all requests for documentation and then got the generic “Banking partners are reviewing” message. I replied on the 28th and the 30th asking more questions. The 1st of December I got another “banking partners are reviewing” email that did not answer my questions (timeline, should I switch to another payment provider”. Got another such message on the 4th that I replied to. And yes - those were coming from legal instead of risk management.
On the 5th my husband sent two emails to them after opening chats with support. Chat gives you the generic “just be patient. We can’t do anything but mark this as urgent” answer. You cannot speak to anyone by phone. He was mad and persistent - opening multiple chats a day over the 5th and 6th until finally we got a senior chat advisor. Whether that was by luck of the draw or because we kept pursuing it and didn’t mark any of our conversations as resolved/closed I do not know. He said he put it into a different “bucket” for reply and that we should receive a reply within 24 hours. Within a few hours of that the man from Trust & Safety contacted me!(evening of the 6th) and said that I had to put an age gate on my products containing wine. He explained that I needed a waiver and he was requesting one. I immediately did so and emailed him confirmation. The 7th he said he had submitted everything to the bank partner. The 8th he sent notice that the review was complete. That was a Friday so payout resumed on Monday the 11th. Back payments were in two chunks on the 11th and 12th then everything went back to normal.
i did discuss with him whether I should use an alternate payment provider during the review and if my payments would be released if I turned off Shopify payments. The answer is yes but you need to email them to let them know you want the review to continue. I was in the process of switching to PayPal when payments were released. We were also looking at Bankful. Their process takes several days. My intent was to get payments released then see if I could reactivate Shopify payments pending review since there is a 2% fee charged by Shopify. For me POS wasn’t an issue - I’d have just used my Square account. I don’t know if that would have worked or if I would have been unable to reactivate Shopify payments until the review was complete.
All of that to say I don’t know what worked. No idea whether getting resolution after the chats with support helped or it was just finally my turn. My advice is to get support tickets opened with chat support and be persistent.
Our Shopify Payments got reinstated a week ago and our payouts got reactivated this past Monday. So we were down for a week and the damage has already been done. We can’t recoup those lost sales. Getting a one day warning before a shutdown in December is not enough time and can severely impact a business like ours. Our Bankful account took over a week to get approved, so we had no ability to use the POS during that time. I am glad we now have an alternate payment method to fall back on, but my trust for Shopify has been diminished. I know what to expect from them now.