Bottle Split and Funds Frozen by PayPal: Best Payment Processor for Taking Payments?

[Aida]

Hey everyone, here’s a slightly silly experience report, but hopefully it can be useful to someone.

At the beginning of March, I organized a split for a bottle of Slumberhouse Jeke: 6 × 5 ml portions, around €22 per share, so roughly €130 collected in total.

Everything was going smoothly: the decants were filled, shipments were ready to go from the post office in La Guillotière… and then PayPal decided that the series of payments coming in close together looked suspicious and put the funds on hold.

For twelve days.

Yep. Twelve days. Long enough for me to send them photos of the bottle, proof of shipment, everything.

The worst part was one of the participants was Dutch. He had paid via Friends & Family, so he had zero buyer protection and basically no recourse on his end while the money was frozen. I spent those twelve days reassuring him via DM.

Since I also use payment processors to collect payments for my online workshops, I decided to use the whole episode as an excuse to properly compare the options. I spent an evening going through the fees and payout times.

So, Stripe is around 2.9% + $0.30, with payouts within a few days, but what really put me off is that stories about accounts being frozen seem to come up pretty often.

So now I’m looking more into Merchant of Record services, something like Lemon Squeezy. The fees are higher — around 5% plus a few cents — but it seems like there’s much less risk of funds being frozen. The downside is that they only pay out on the 1st and 15th, which isn’t exactly ideal for me.

How do you guys handle payments for your splits, honestly?

Thanks in advance for your feedback!