About a year ago, we had a bit of trouble with PayPal: not only had they frozen my son’s account with birthday money in it, they actually went back and reversed payments to some vendors which they had approved several days earlier! We had received the goods, the payment disappeared from the vendors’ account and the vendors were seriously unimpressed.
With us!
It took me a while to contact these vendors, explain the situation and beg them not to suspend our accounts because of an unforseen action by PayPal, which we had no control over. (In the case of Steam, loosing the account would also have lost us all the games we had previously bought on that site over several years.)
Then, I started jumping through all kinds of ‘hoops’ that PayPal dictated, so that they would release the funds. I did everything – and fulfilled their every demand, however unreasonable, to the best of my abilities.
They still would not release the funds.
After well over a month, they finally re-activated the account: for a day. We had 24 hours to spend the money – whatever was not spent would be frozen for ever…
At this point, I will rather not buy something than use PayPal to do it.
Which is why I am glad to hear that more and more retailers are looking at PayPal alternatives. Here is a good article about one company’s search and why they ditched PayPal for Stripe: if you receive money through PayPal, this is required reading!