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Comment by shorsusan1 | Hacker News Reader

I am considering on using Paypal in my startup business. How do you feel about it? I attended a startup conference 6 months ago. Paypal was also there claiming that there will be solutions for startup business. I don't know if this is a special case. How can I avoid my capital from being frozen? Singing "Let it go"?

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Will you have delivered the product/service at issue at the time you charge the card or within a short period of time thereafter? If so, it is highly likely you will not have any issue with Paypal. If you are accepting pre-payment for something which cannot be delivered in full shortly after payment, it is likely that you'll have to become conversant with Paypal's published guidelines about this.

Spoiler alert: if you are in an events business, "We emailed a ticket" does not constitute delivery of the purchase. Successful conclusion of the event constitutes delivery. Most events businesses structurally need to pre-sell tickets. They will, virtually inevitably, have more issues with collecting payments than e.g. a software company which says "You give us a credit card we give you a working download link." This is not a result of caprice by Paypal -- more than 1% of scheduled events fail to actually happen; when that happens, Paypal gets hit with hundreds of chargebacks.

More details: https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/brc/presale-policy-and-re...

Events businesses: https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/brc/account-reserves-tick...

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