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All clear, for the time being.
2 months ago
General
I kept waking up every 2 hours last night, took the opportunity to check how PayPal was doing, and limitations were removed minutes after their Customer Support agents clock in this morning. Bullet dodged. When they go after artists again and put me through that kind of stress? I don't know. That is why over the weekend, I've set up and already done 1 sale through a brand new Stripe account.
For anyone curious about Stripe: How they handle invoices is a little silly. They take their tiny cut of a sale from the invoice, but then they charge you directly for the invoice service itself based on the cost of your sale - they don't also take that from the invoice in the same breath. It'll take a week after opening an account before you can withdraw earnings, I made my first sale on the first day so it'll take the same amount of time to properly hit my account... so I'm gonna get billed £0.10p through the week to get my balance out of the negative.
Silly but harmless. A positive is they're far more open on their verification side of things. That saves quite the headache and all the money given the bureaucratic nightmare getting the go-to ideas of ID I otherwise personally don't need is here in the UK. You can get official government "Voter Photo ID" certificates here for free, and they openly list Voter ID as a verification method for the UK.
So my headspace is, I'll continue using PayPal - Invoices are gonna be the most regimented single uniform thing going. If they cause me grief like that in the future, then I'll have the security of a Stripe already set up and fully functional as a fallback and keep things going. Better to have it and not need it and all that. I've also seen they're rolling out a "Customer Feedback" option on Invoicing. It's not visible to me, so I'll be keeping an eye open to turn that off.
And just in case to fellow artists, Paypal is not a bank. I withdraw anything I earn within minutes. The longest I've left it is a lower single-digit amount of hours, and that's only the rare instance I know I'm gonna make another sale before the end of the day.
For anyone curious about Stripe: How they handle invoices is a little silly. They take their tiny cut of a sale from the invoice, but then they charge you directly for the invoice service itself based on the cost of your sale - they don't also take that from the invoice in the same breath. It'll take a week after opening an account before you can withdraw earnings, I made my first sale on the first day so it'll take the same amount of time to properly hit my account... so I'm gonna get billed £0.10p through the week to get my balance out of the negative.
Silly but harmless. A positive is they're far more open on their verification side of things. That saves quite the headache and all the money given the bureaucratic nightmare getting the go-to ideas of ID I otherwise personally don't need is here in the UK. You can get official government "Voter Photo ID" certificates here for free, and they openly list Voter ID as a verification method for the UK.
So my headspace is, I'll continue using PayPal - Invoices are gonna be the most regimented single uniform thing going. If they cause me grief like that in the future, then I'll have the security of a Stripe already set up and fully functional as a fallback and keep things going. Better to have it and not need it and all that. I've also seen they're rolling out a "Customer Feedback" option on Invoicing. It's not visible to me, so I'll be keeping an eye open to turn that off.
And just in case to fellow artists, Paypal is not a bank. I withdraw anything I earn within minutes. The longest I've left it is a lower single-digit amount of hours, and that's only the rare instance I know I'm gonna make another sale before the end of the day.
