Fwiw has anyone dealt with something like this? I'm not sure what my options are.
Shopify froze my payments. I've been dealing with this for about 8 months now and the situation isn't improving.
The amount being held/disputed is approximately $16,412. I have tried contacting their legal department 10 times with no resolution imo.
What are my legal options here? Is it worth pursuing?
Just want to point out — the statute of limitations might be a factor here. In some states it's as short as 1-2 years. Don't sit on this too long fwiw.
I've dealt with this before.
The trap most people fall into is escalating to a supervisor/manager. I'd recommend following the formal complaint procedure instead no cap.
Shopify Payments uses Stripe under the hood and their hold policies have gotten more aggressive. Escalate through merchant support AND file a complaint with your state AG.
I recovered $22K in frozen Shopify Payments funds by having my lawyer send a demand letter. Shopify released the funds within 12 days.
This is really helpful information. Appreciate everyone's input.
Document everything. I can't stress this enough.
Have you tried escalating through their executive customer service? Sometimes that works.
Reviving this because it happened to me and the thread was useful.
The trigger in my case was a sudden change in order volume plus a spike in one product. Nothing fraudulent, just a post that did well. The reserve went on automatically. Knowing it is usually pattern triggered rather than a judgment about you personally made it much easier to write a useful response, because the useful response is documentation of the pattern rather than a defence of your character.
Fulfilment records, supplier invoices, tracking numbers. That is what moved mine.
The reserve is the part worth understanding before you argue.
A rolling reserve holds a percentage of incoming volume for a set period rather than freezing a fixed pot. That means your balance keeps changing while you are disputing it, and people misread that movement as a decision being made. Ask for the reserve percentage and the release schedule in writing. Once you have those two numbers you can actually forecast, and you stop refreshing the dashboard.
OP. Mine released, and the thing I would tell my past self is to keep selling.
I paused the store to stop the bleeding, which sounds sensible and was exactly wrong, because a rolling reserve releases against ongoing volume. Pausing froze the mechanism that was going to give me the money back. If you can keep fulfilling cleanly, the reserve unwinds. If you stop, it sits there.
Obviously that depends on being able to fund fulfilment in the meantime, which is its own problem.