Sellers beware of Stripe as a payment processor

Square Imaginarium

Hello Everyone.

I am an AFOL with a 5 year old who is crazy about LEGO and I decided to open a BrickOwl store a couple weeks ago to try to off-set some of the cost of our favorite play activity.

I set up an account with Stripe and made my first sale a couple days ago. I received the following email today from Stripe:

Thanks for using Stripe!
We've noticed that your website seems to sell some fairly popular brands. Before we can resume payouts to your bank account, we do need to request confirmation that your store is authorized to resell these brands.
We're really sorry about the trouble—unfortunately, a few bad actors can make for a few extra hoops for legitimate businesses to climb through. If you send us documentation confirming your authorized reseller status, we are happy to resume payouts!
We've also enabled a prompt in your Stripe dashboard[1] that will show you this message—once we're all set with this verification, we’ll go ahead and take this notice down.
Best,
Yolanda

I checked my Stripe account and this is indeed legit.

I hate that my first post to the forums is this post, but this appears to be a problem that has been encountered by several sellers here and on BL (I've been researching). I have closed my little shop until i have this matter resolved, but i intend to stop using Stripe and switch over exclusively to PayPal.

I hope that other new sellers do not experience the same, or that the admins at BrickOwl will consider removing Stripe support.

Thank you anyone reading for your input and listening to my rant.

Hoddie

As you say, this appears to be a regular issue with Stripe, though most sellers manage to resolve it. The other threads on the issue should explain how.

Jay Quade

I recently had similar via Shopify payments, they was holding £500 back until we provided our reseller license, we do not have them here in the UK but despite this they was a pain for over 2 weeks till common sense hit in.

thecueshop

We resolved ours after a week and sending them a couple of our receipts for some bulk we bought off eBay. I also sent them a log of purchases we made form yard sales, Craigs list, and FB finds. We approached as we only sell used as they would never understand the parting out of new parts.
This is the last email that finally resolved it for us. Use any of or all of it as you wish.

Franklin,

Obviously, you don’t understand our business. The first thing you need to know is that we sell USED Lego parts. That means we have purchased them and have the right to do whatever we want: sell them, burn them, or launch them to the moon. We get our products from many sources including, but not limited to: eBay, Let Go!, Craigs List, and plain old fashioned yard sales. We buy them from people that have purchased them legally, through authorized retailers. We don’t have the original sales receipts as you are not required to provide a receipt when you sell YOUR OWN BELONGINGS. I have attached, for shits and grins, my current quarter purchase logs for your perusal, including my eBay receipts. As you can see, the majority of my parts have been bought from private sellers on eBay. Nothing I do is illegal. Nothing I do requires an “authorized reseller” status. There are THOUSANDS of other sellers doing the exact same thing that I am doing on the BrickLink and Brick Owl platforms. You have approached many of my fellow sellers and have resolved the issue easily and quickly (within a day) with a simple clarification email. We are now nearing a week that you have frozen my ability to use your service.

Square Imaginarium

Thanks for the comments. Got notification this morning that all is resolved. Would be nice if stripe would make more in their system regarding the nature of BrickOwl and the sellers here so that future users may avoid this headache.