Your payouts from Shopify Payments are on hold while we review your account

Shopify Discussion
1

OK been using Shopify for 4 months - have had an online website same url for 25 years. Have used various other website hosts and zero issues - EVER. See an alert in our admin today which states “Your payouts from Shopify Payments are on hold while we review your account”. I’m like WHAT?

NO EMAIL sent - I happened to see it in our admin. Just did an online chat with Jonathan from Shopify support and he asked me “did I get an email”. I asked him do you see that I did - he said no. You want to state then why did you even ask? You know the answer.

I am upset right now as why not do a review in the background - why hold our payments? Yesterday we received our daily payout and now this - sitting on a balance of $2600 now for orders in the past day. You can do the math to figure out how this could add up quickly!

We produce and sell honey! No email sent - customers can still check out - we simply can’t get our funds. Why did they place a review on our website that has been in business 25 years? No idea? How often does this happen? No idea? We’ve been with Shopify 4 months now - why now? No idea?

Have found the platform easy and great to work with - in fact have a 3 year plan. But, simply holding payments when no one can tell us why is not good. Take a look at our site ebeehoney (dot) com - we are not selling any contraband, in fact gearing down a bit. Spring time our business starts to take off again once new honey varieties start to come off the hives.

What is everyone’s take on these holds coming out of nowhere and how often does Shopify do these general reviews? The Shopify support person looked at our website and he could not find a reason. Are the bots now running Shopify?

Jonathan did follow up and stated it takes 24 to 72 hours for a manual review and he also gave me a ticket number as he escalated it for me. I have found Shopify support very good and Jonathan tried as best he could.

My concern is the process! Shopify can and should do these types of reviews in the background to make sure shops are not selling contraband, etc. But holding payout hold funds from a website prior to the review taking place is not good.

How many times per year does this happen to a website? Appreciate any replies as we’ve been online longer than most businesses and have never seen this type of system? Shoot we’ve used Paypal since their inception 1998-1999 and not 1 issue EVER from Paypal when they were our primary payment processor prior to coming over to Shopify?

Have a great day!

2

That could be very unnerving. Hopefully you receive the reason, could be a number of things. Credit card on file to pay subscription may have expired. A customer cc may have been stolen or something. Whatever it is they should be reporting to you asap with directions on how to resolve.

3

Mont - thanks! no chargebacks on the platform - I did update our credit card even though no apps are due to be billed for a few more days. Shopify platform paid in full for 3 years - will update once support gets back in touch and releases our payments.

4

Hi, @eBeeLuv

Thank you for posting your experience to the Community. Your feedback is important and we appreciate it!

I definitely understand it’s frustrating to have this alert, yet no email. I can definitely agree this process could be better. Did the Support Advisor you spoke to mention if he was able to have our designated team send off an email to you? The reason they had to ask whether you received an email is due to these situations are being handled by an escalated team, whose tickets are not readily available to our advisors.

The hold you are experiencing is standard, and generally only happens once. However, at times our banking partners require additional reviews in the future. These are rare. These reviews are mandatory to ensure that your business is operating in the location in which your account states. While it would be great to be able to release the held funds, we are required to hold the payouts while the review takes place to ensure all documentation is approved.

Lastly, I see you have uploaded an attachment. While I can’t safely open attachments, if it includes any sensitive information such as your ticket number, pertinent to your account please delete the attachment.

Thanks for your patience!

5

I don’t know, I have another store at Godaddy and use Stripe they have an entire report on everyCC transaction. Almost too much info. Good point Shopify Payments should have that somewhere

6

Attachment simply shows we are eligible for a 43k loan from Shopify and so far funds of $2,600 being held from past day sales - ironic they shut down our payments, yet they want to give us a loan?

No email is being sent - just a ticket number generated and time frame of 24-72 hours but who really knows? The bad part about this is chat support has no clue - it seems like an account would be reviewed prior to 4 months? I’m hopeful since Shopify has been great to work with that this process is quick and actual people are doing it and not some AI bot.

7

found how to look for chargebacks - use filter system and we have none so who knows why? Makes zero sense as most likely a bot flagged the site for mentioning the word “honey” when in fact we do sell honey - the kind you eat! Will post when this gets resolved!

8

Hi, @eBeeLuv

In that case, I would definitely remove that attachment, just to be safe!

In these situations the advisor is generally required to reach out to our escalated team to ensure they send an email off. The statement that there is a 24-72 hour wait sounds like things are on the right track. Albeit, I understand that must feel like an eternity.

I assure you we do not use bots for these reviews and they are each done by real humans.

9

Followup: A Shopify support person from the Trust and Safety team sent me an email stating the banks couldn’t access our site to analyze due our security. We only allow access from the U.S. and 2 other smaller countries that buy for companies they have in the U.S. and who’ve we’ve dealt with for over a decade.

So the issue was they needed to access our website to analyze. Last night I opened it up to Canada (thinking Shopify is in Canada). I also have VPN’s access denied since VPN’s are notorious for fraudulent activity. Shutting that down won’t cause us issues. So I also removed the VPN block and within 1 hour our site is now approved again to allow payments to be sent to our bank account.

I asked the Shopify Trust and Safety person a few questions like where are the so called banks trying to access our site from? Are they using VPN’s? etc. So basically I am being told by Shopify to open our store to anyone - if fraudulent orders come in - deal with it then - what about the credit card fees on these fraudulent orders? Seriously, not good. However, I still have all countries that I had blocked and simply opened up the VPN and our account is sending us payments again.

Can someone PLEASE explain without a canned response why it seems we have to allow VPN’s to access our website to receive our payments? Is this the case or not? Talk about security risks! After I receive our payout going to place a block on VPN’s and see if our payments are blocked again. Doing a little experiment as we should be able to secure our website!!!

Here’s is the email reply:

"Jay here from the Trust and Safety team here at Shopify.

I am based in Ireland but as for the banking partners that information I am unable to provide.

The banking partners need to be able to access the store at any time in order to conduct standard reviews of the account which is why the account has payouts on hold. Furthermore to this, standard payouts hold will occur on every account and this is not preventable. It is standard practice in order for us to gather context from the merchants as you can expect we will be ignored if we do not conduct this practice.

In order for you to no ship to specific regions there are other procedures in place such as accepting and fulfilling orders after the order has come through to avoid fraud and precent any concerns related to fraudulent activity.

Also, there are shipping zones and shipping settings that you can put in place in order for the customers in specific regions not to be able to purchase from your store. Please utilise these settings rather than using alternative applications to prevent customers from specific regions from accessing the storefront as we can not review the account until this has been completed - if this has already been done, thank you."

10

Here’s our take on everything. Your reply states we should allow the risk of fraudulent orders to occur and then refund them back after the fact? Who would then cover the credit card fees we would incur?

You see simply having the shipping setup to only receive U.S. orders is not good enough. IP countries and addresses need to be able to be blocked (which we do) to stop these bad orders from coming in.

You see stolen credit cards are used around the world (big black market). So, if someone from the U.K. is using stolen U.S. credit cards and is then able to access our website and use the correct billing address which these thieves have, the order would go through using your take of just setting up shipping to only accept U.S. orders. This is very lax security to say the least and something we won’t risk.

That is why I stated where are these so called banks located trying to access our site? After turning on VPN access did that trigger our account to become active again? This makes no logical sense either as VPN’s increase risk.

In fact, if someone tries to open up an account on Shopify using a VPN their request is denied (forums state this). So you are stating to open up our site to any country along with allowing VPN access simply so the banks can keep an eye on things? We have never allowed this in 25 years as you talk about fraudulent activity then! We only sell within the U.S. and our risk level is very low due to this.

So please let me know what allowed our account to open up again and receive payments and trying to figure out the system here so we can place tight security on our website yet allow these so called banks the ability to view our site.

I searched the Shopify site and it states Shopify utilizes 2 U.S. banks? You see we have no problem with granting them access, but opening up our website to the entire world is not acceptable. So please let us know so we can secure our website again.

I’ve attached what I believe was this Shopify support person trying to access our site. Which by the way is still blocked. After my reply stating the banks tend to be in the U.S., etc. someone opened our payment account back up and no access from outside the U.S. was given.

Quite strange - is it actually the banks not having access to our website or Shopify staff from who knows where? Shopify payment folks should have access to our site without actually having to view it on the internet - that also makes no sense as they should be able to get into the backend.

No reputable company is going to allow their website to be accessible to everyone in the world due to where they sell, where higher risk countries are known, etc. just so banks located who knows where and by who can see your website.

Can anyone explain?

11

Hi, @eBeeLuv

I apologize for the confusion. Customer’s purchasing with fraudulent cards, or IP addresses, etc. is a completely separate issue from your Shopify Payments verification. Are you worried about fraudulent orders? These two issues would not be related. However, if you have concerns over this, I can definitely provide advice. Perhaps you reached this conclusion due to the other user mentioning chargebacks? Chargebacks are also a separate issue from verification.

Please allow me to explain what the verification process is more specifically. Verification for your payment gateway is required by all payment gateways operating in the United States. It’s even required for PayPal when accepting business transactions. Because you are a new user of Shopify Payments, our banking partners need to verify that you are who you say you are, not your customer.

A hypothetical situation would be a potential merchant who lives in Iceland wants to use Shopify Payments, but it isn’t available in Norway due to legal restrictions. To overcome this, instead of inputting an Icelandic address when signing up, they input a US address. This would be illegal. Many potential merchants attempt to do this, and it is one of the reasons why our banking partners need to verify each merchant’s identity.

I definitely agree that the process could, and should be streamlined. You are completely correct and I empathize with the frustration. I too would be frustrated. That being said, we legally need to verify each Shopify Payments user. I agree it should have happened sooner, and I can’t answer why it didn’t. I assure you, this is all standard, and your payouts will be released as soon as your identity is verified.

On behalf of Shopify, your patience is greatly appreciated.

12

Skye, per the Shopify rep. who stated in the email where I quoted above from the rep. “The banking partners need to be able to access the store at any time in order to conduct standard reviews of the account which is why the account has payouts on hold.”

So basically we are being told NOT to place any type of country restrictions, IP restrictions, etc. on our website. This so the banking partners from who knows where can at anytime throughout the year (please refer to the statement above) access our website. That is how we interpret the above quote - how would you interpret it?

We have a very secure website and have never accepted orders from outside the U.S. so shutting down any attempts to access our website from abroad has always been our standard; as well as, shutting down VPN access and we will continue to do so.

We are told basically to remove any country or IP restrictions and simply rely on the shopping cart to flag problem orders. Anyone who has run an ecommerce site for any amount of time would laugh at this! And that ecommerce site will not be in business long.

So, I go back to stating that when any banks from Shopify want to access our site, someone just needs to either reach out and let us know what country to allow access from if they are from outside the U.S. so we can open up our security just for them, or they can always access from an U.S. non VPN connection. I don’t find this unreasonable - they could check our site daily from within the U.S. But telling an ecommerce site that only deals with U.S. orders to allow open access since no one seems to know where these so called banks are from is alarming.

Appreciate the communication - I am trying to show the standard practices that website likes ours that have operated for 30 years are set up and how stopping fraudulent activity is our top concern. The banks at Shopify that are verifying us - I would think would be thrilled we are tight on security? It sounds like they continue to monitor things throughout the year and this isn’t a 1 time deal?

So, next time a bank needs access, just let us know - denying our order payments for a well established business should never be done! And then to tell us to open our security to any IP in the world is insane.

Have a great day!

13

Shopify customer service is appalling. They have shut 3 of my shops claiming we are selling licenced goods that have not been sources through legitimate channels.

They didn’t check first. rather, they shut us down and then asked for evidence and gave us only a few days, while we were closed over Easter.

We’ve been in business 20 years and have been online for 5+ years.

The power they have to close a business without warning based on what some AI bot thinks is appalling. I suspect it contravenes Australian law.