08/17/2023
Deyeme Racing began using PayPal around 2000, based on a suggestion from a customer. Before that, we accepted payment via COD and check or money order. Soon after, we added credit and debit card capability independent of PayPal. We haven't had COD for quite some time, but you can still go old-school and actually send a check or money order! Of course, CC and PayPal are our most popular, each accounting for about 45% of our sales, while other methods make up the remaining 10%. Lately, PayPal has been making some troubling changes to their service agreements, especially for business account holders. Their most recent change is ending bank account linking for debit card holders. It's been a convenience to not have to transfer money manually into PP to make everyday purchases, and if the PP balance ran low, our business checking would fill the gap automatically. This is ending in a few weeks, making our PP debit card essentially useless, unless we keep thousands of dollars in the account. We don't, because the PayPal Account Balance is NOT FDIC insured (they are registered as a money transmitter, not a bank). Next up, PayPal has begin acting punitively against us when our customers put us over a monthly threshold, which can happen in a single transaction if one of our authorized retailers makes a large restocking purchase. Once over the limit, PayPal freezes those funds for almost a month, claiming it's for fraud prevention, and encouraging us to include tracking info to free up the money (even though we send invoice updates with ship dates and tracking links to all our customers). Even when we manually enter tracking information into PayPal's website, though, the funds remain frozen for weeks.
For these and other reasons, we are going to begin throttling availability for making payments via PayPal, as they throttle the availability of funds we receive. When you're on our Checkout page, you may see the PayPal options greyed out with a message that PayPal is currently unavailable. You may still use any of the other payment methods, or wait a few days, and the PayPal option should be available again.
If anyone has suggestions on alternatives to PayPal, we welcome them.
