How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps
I've been resisting the urge to market my startup as a PayPal alternative, because we're really focused on payments for in-person retail sales (largely to avoid competing with PayPal), but this is probably the fifth or sixth PayPal-froze-my-account posting I've seen on Hacker News and they all seem to garner enormous amounts of sympathy from readers. We've also built all of the infrastructure you'd need to do internet payments. As an aside, my non-profit's account was frozen once but I got it unfrozen in fairly short order, and at worst it was a minor annoyance. I gather that people have had much worse experiences, however. So that leads me to wonder:<p>- Would people really consider signing up for a payment startup's services they'd never heard of? Everyone complains about PayPal, and I'd argue rightly so, but at the same time everyone is also quick to say that they don't trust a company they don't know with their information.<p>- What's the most important service that PayPal offers that people are looking for? Just plain, vanilla, pay-me-through-my-web-site? Something else?<p>- Are these accounts that are routinely frozen related to international transactions somehow? Because we can't do business internationally and most payment startups can't. The regulatory and risk barriers are serious.<p>If there's a market for U.S.-based services that we can offer, maybe it's time to think more seriously about starting to compete.