lost

The Data Big Tech Companies Have On You (Or, At Least, What They Admit To)

BTTF  De Lorean

As of June 15th, 2018, PayPal has changed their user policy with little to no fanfare at all in ways that could literally destroy your business. I’m going to say this as plainly as possible:

DO NOT USE PAYPAL AT ALL IF POSSIBLE.

I know this is a lot to ask, especially since PayPal is the most globally accepted digital tender, but unless you want to lose access to your funds for six months and PayPal possibly forever, you need to read this.

PayPal Business accounts are now being flagged, locked, and completely shut down if:

1. If you haven’t shipping anything within 21 days of your first transaction

2. You’ve received more than 200 orders

and/or

3. You’ve made an excess of $20,000 (USD)

If this happens to you, you will not be able to access your money for up to six months. PayPal is NOT willing to work with you, all they will say is there’s nothing they can do, they’re cutting business ties, and offer you the MAILING address of their legal department. That’s right, you can’t even get a direct line to these people, they’re just going to tank your business by dicking around with your money for six months. Your only options are to:

1. Wait six months and frustrate customers, and by-proxy tarnish your reputation.

2. Refund everyone, possibly lose their business, and tarnish your reputation.

3. Pursue the matter legally, which will likely take longer than six months anyway, not to mention cost money out of pocket.

Thankfully most of my stuff is filtered through other sites first but fucking here we go again.

It used to be you could get around this by marking your stuff as digital goods that dont need shipment notification but I dunno if that’ll work anymore. All I know is paypal has been making it increasingly difficult for a lot of artists and creators lately and it’s a logistical nightmare for a lot of us.

It started out with “you can’t use a stage name unless you have a business account”. Which means you get a chunk of your money taken as a processing fee, but get to use a “business” name instead of your real name AND LOCATION, cause that’s a thing they were forcing you to post too unless you upgraded.

People used to tell me all the time when they put a tip in my tip jar that it was telling them my real name and the city I lived in, so eventually I bit the bullet and upgraded to avoid that. (Which is why ko-fi was/is so great, because it’s essentially a paypal wrapper that lets you use the service while not revealing your identity and location.)

But they’ve been making it increasingly harder and harder to run an online business for anyone who doesn’t ship physical items that can be tracked. Like part of it is likely to ensure that customers are getting what they paid for, but when it comes so quickly on the heels of numerous policy updates regarding sex work and adult content, it is undoubtedly linked to making it more difficult for those people to use their services.

Patreon might be doing my head in with their site constantly breaking, and they fuck up on communication issues a lot, but this is largely why they changed who they do their payment processing with, to avoid paypals “no naughty business” policies. They still use paypal and Stripe, but they moved their handler to other countries with less draconian laws, and broadened to other payment processors because of this kind of thing.

the following you MUST do if you are a nsfw/sfw content creator

-ALWAYS set each and every goods and service exchanged’s shipping details to “order processed” it tells paypal that you have processed the order and does NOT require a shipping label to be created

-when naming invoices, dont use anything that says like “cum gargling ball buster 9000 featuring princess peach from mario”, that will get you blocked since you arent selling any physical media and to paypal’s guidelines that soliciting sex/prostitution (only if you refuse to file the first step or fill it as the first step)

-NEVER have commissioners send money as “a friend” to bypass the processing fee, its a few $ that you arent receiving, get tf over it, its better than dealing with legal issues, have them send as “goods and service” and if they dont send as that refund the money back (this keeps you on good legal ground)

-when naming invoices just simply state the type of comm ie: “Cell shade +bg + 1 add char: Sluggirl OC” its that easy

and if people wanna argue with me, then lemme tell ya, ive used paypal EXACTLY like this for 4 fuckin years and the only thing that ive had happen was someone was attempting login somewhere and they notified me and i changed my password. I have OVER 200 invoices, and not ONCE have i needed to ship an actual item and ive been doing nsfw SINCE 2014

so all of this is a scare thing cause someone hates paypal or just doesnt properly understand paypal’s ToS. so ALL the artists that follow me and use paypal dont fall for this stupid clickbaity bs is just follow my steps and youll be 100% FUCKIN FINE 

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