Here’s another case of eBay and PayPal shutting down businesses for trading legally. This time it’s even more bizaare than the coffee shop, PayPal closed down a book shops account for offering to sell to various places including Cuba and Syria even though the book shop wouldn’t accept PayPal payments from those countries!
Because the book shop simply offered to ship to various places the US doesn’t like that was enough for PayPal to close them down, even through PayPal had nothing to do with any potential or actual transactions.
So to sum it up if you legally ship product to a country you legally can sell to from the UK and if you don’t accept PayPal from those countries, then PayPal will still close your account if you accept PayPal from UK customers!
According to The Independent it took Cambridge International Book Centre two days to remove the offending countries from their website and get their PayPal account reinstated.
If you accept PayPal on your own website make sure that you’ve got no products for sale from countries under a US embargo and remove any shipping options to countries under US embargo (even if you don’t accept PayPal from those countries), otherwise it could be you that PayPal shut down next. Not an ideal situation, but that appears to be what PayPal are enforcing.
5 Responses
just checked my countries I have blocked on eBay… hang on…. where’s Cuba on the lists??? and where is Iran?? Myanmar? Syria? no… I can’t see them anywhere. So as I haven’t blocked it, does that mean I will be treated as though I am supplying them?
Or is eBay protecting us by already blocking these countries?
Totally agree with the other comments. When is worldwide on ebay not worldwide. Is there a list of embargoed countries? Ebay and Paypal need to clarify.
Ebay do have a policy on embargoed countries:-
https://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/embargo.html
If the old physical Product is bean target. Then why not Digital Book or Social Membership to these black out IP Address. I thought the world was opening its doors to all 🙁