Re: questions regarding Neo900 Shop
 

I would say that is not the case. Then theu would have seized the account.
It is true that card brands like VISA and Mastercard have strict rules on goods they allow sold on their cards. Also on who is on the board etc etc. But, this is not one included.

Re: questions regarding Neo900 Shop
 

Their terms lists (bolded which ones I believe did the verdict)

How long you’ve been in business.
Whether your industry has a higher likelihood of chargebacks, refunds, or fraud.
Whether your account has had a higher than average number of customer disputes, claims, chargebacks, bank reversals, or refunds.
Whether you’re selling products or services in advance (preselling orders).
Your processing history with PayPal and other providers.
Your business and/or personal credit history.
Your delivery time frames - whether there are extended delivery timeframes.
If there have been significant changes in your business such as: large increase in daily or monthly sales, increase in your average sale price, increase in your dispute, claim, chargeback, or refund rates.

Re: questions regarding Neo900 Shop
 

Wishing you a speedy recovery! :)

Re: questions regarding Neo900 Shop
 

There is a way to help this situation that is faster than 180 days.

1. Some users express interest in sending their funds to Neo900 via non-paypal means.
2. These users identify their paypal accounts to Neo900
3. Neo900 finds these transactions in paypal and reverses them.
4. Users receive funds back from paypal, and send to Neo900

If having returned transactions has a negative impact on seller ranking, I imagine it would be Neo900's choice between the ranking impact and waiting 180 days.

Paypal's safest bet when so much money may be charged back is to sit on it until they know they won't have to be responsible for chargebacks. And I imagine they don't want the reputation hit of helping subversion of a corporate monopoly.

Re: questions regarding Neo900 Shop
 

Yes, this is one of the ideas we're trying to float by PayPal (see the attachment in Joerg's post).

One possible problem I suspect may exist is that PayPal might not remove reversed transactions from the reserve. Their terms and conditions are not clear on the interaction between reserves and reversals.

If this is the case, reversing transactions would only make things worse. So we have to tread carefully there.

- Werner

Re: questions regarding Neo900 Shop
 

Yes, please be extremely carefull with that. I have a very strong feeling that the reserve will remain, even if PP reverses the transactions (which they will of course do).
The reservations is there to protect them. Its a part of their risk management.
The only way to prohibit this is to completely close the agreement account - with PP, and even then, PP might decide to keep the reserve for a certain time, before releasing.

Best advice, dont do it that way.

Re: questions regarding Neo900 Shop
 

If someone who donated a small amount is willing to participate, you could use them as a test. Then only a small amount of money is up to question.

• If the transaction cannot be reversed because the money is in the reserve, the money stays in the reserve, and we learn the technique does not help
• If the transaction is reversed, but the reserve balance stays, then paypal has messed their books up and you have extra money
• If the transaction is reversed, and the reserve balance drops, and this is a problem because you need to meet the quota, you can deposit the money back in the paypal account.

But i think reversing some consenting transactions could be the only way to get money out in a reasonable amount of time. If legal action is planned, before doing the technique en masse, I imagine you'd want to check with a lawyer to see if the behavior might support or hinder the legal action.

Re: questions regarding Neo900 Shop
 

You can do this without needing the transaction list from paypal by choosing transactions of consenting users from your personal transaction history on paypal's website.

Re: questions regarding Neo900 Shop
 

We are still trying to keep the way open for a resolution going forward, i.e., to convince PayPal that our project and customers pose no extraordinary risks for them and that they can therefore remove the reserve.

Reversals would have an adverse effect on our "rating", so we would not want to make this sort of experiment at the present time.

Unfortunately, PayPal are not as easy to "debug" as a piece of software. Running the problem scenario again and again until you figure out what's wrong isn't likely to produce desirable results in this case.

- Werner

Re: questions regarding Neo900 Shop
 

PayPal has responded numerous times when asked by our supporters about specific transactions that these transactions were not affected by the reserve.

So without PayPal telling us exactly which transaction are in the reserve, we would not learn anything useful by such an experiment.

- Werner

Re: questions regarding Neo900 Shop
 

That, is probably due to that every single transaction can be reversed.
The reserve, is not tied to specific transactions. But held as a deposit in case.....

Re: questions regarding Neo900 Shop
 

It may also be that PayPal's idea of a "successful transaction" may be different from yours or mine. The PayPal's answers I read that people posted here generally lacked any specifics and, it saddens me to say, so did the people's questions. It is quite possible that as far as PayPal is concerned, transaction X was successful even if the intended recipient has never received the money. You need to ask very specifically and insist on a very specific answer.

Unfortunately I cannot assist as my last payment to Neo900 was before the affected period.

Re: questions regarding Neo900 Shop
 

The behavior is quite normal. All aquierers have a similar risk evaluation.
They will either

1) Require up-front deposit
2) hold back transaction payments (to the shop) for a given period
3) both of the above

Even if shop closes. The withheld amount will be withheld for a given time.
This is because fraud might be reported for a long time after initial transaction.
Its simply to cover their own asses.
PP, Amazon, Apple and others are their own aquirers, simply because no card aquirer will agree on the risk of their 'one click' solutions.

Re: questions regarding Neo900 Shop
 

Hello guys.

I sent the recommended letter to PayPal's support, they kinda ignored it (I just received a suggestion to leave feedback about their support - guess what I wrote there). So I called them directly by phone.

After ~10 minutes of investigating, the lady on the other end of the wire told me that PayPal is aware of the problem with "pre-sale vs. crowdfunding" and is working with Neo900 UG to resolve it. And since this problem has nothing to do with my account in particular, they can't tell me much more than that.

It would be cool if @jOERG or @wpwrak could either confirm or dispel this.

Re: questions regarding Neo900 Shop
 

Thanks a lot ! The good old phone still seem to be the most effective way to get at least somewhat meaningful reactions.

The latest mails Joerg sent to PayPal were Cc:'ed to a neo900.org list, so if PayPal do a "group" response to these mails I would see this. So far, I have not received any such response.

If PayPal sent a reply or any other communication to Joerg directly, we may not find out about that until he's back from vacations to check his mail.

- Werner

Re: questions regarding Neo900 Shop
 

I'm a bit confused, should I keep pushing PayPal?

Re: questions regarding Neo900 Shop
 

This is interesting. Whether such a six months period would apply was one of our questions to PayPal. If this is the case, it would solve most of the problem.

Unfortunately, we will have to wait for Joerg's return from vacation (in two weeks) before we can see if anything has changed on the PayPal account of Neo900 UG.

But this is encouraging news, and the most explicit statement we have obtained on that issue so far. Thanks a lot !

- Werner

Re: questions regarding Neo900 Shop
 

I'm just learning about this and it infuriating. I really don't like using paypal, but sadly it the easiest and cheapest way for me sometime.

Perhaps this is incentive to set up a bitcoin account to by pass this mess. Of course not everyone has or uses bitcoin, but I'm sure there are service that will pass the transaction from CC to bitcoin for a tiny fee and no holding onto money.

One Neo900.org get the bit coin you can transfer it to a bank account or something too protect it's value or leave some in bitcoin and see if it grows. It's on the up tick right now.

ex:
https://www.coinjar.com
http://coinsfer.com
http://cointelegraph.com/news/114326...ound-the-world

I don't know how I will be paying now sadly.

x

Re: questions regarding Neo900 Shop
 

TransferWise should be an option.

Bitcoins are tricky. A few people have offered to evaluate the services and to set this up for us, but nothing every came out of it. So this still sits on the "to do" list.

- Werner

Re: questions regarding Neo900 Shop
 

A quick progress update on the PayPal situation: Joerg safely returned from vacaion tonight and began to worm his way through the mail that has piled up. He says he'll need a couple of days before he's really back, but he already found a communication from his lawyer with a letter from PayPal, answering the mail he sent before the vacations.

In their reply, PayPal seem to confirm the 180 days interpretation, i.e., that funds will be released from the reserve 180 days after arriving.

I write "seem" because they have not acted on it yet, i.e., the PayPal account still looks the same as before, with a reserve of 37 kEUR instead of only the roughly 10 kEUR we have received through PayPal in the last six months.

To be continued ...

- Werner

Re: questions regarding Neo900 Shop
 

Hi everybody!
sorry for the long time of silence but I had to recover from a severe state of inanition.

PayPal decided to answer my mail to a lawyer that was not involved in the communication thread - how weird. Anyway PP's lawyer and author of the answer clearly states that payments shall be released to us 6 months after original transaction. Alas PP doesn't act accordingly, i.e. on our account nothing has changed yet. So I now need to convince PP to act according to their own lawyer's words, which I attach here for you to see the original (truncated to hide any personal data like names and email-addr which I'm not sure the owners would like to see that data published)

I'll post a follow-up as soon as any newsworthy things happen
cheers
jOERG

[edit] ps: I don't think our customers pushing PP further will help much, so maybe you wait with sending further mails until we cleared the 180day subject. If it doesn't pan out, we can restart the P'P'pestering ;)

Re: questions regarding Neo900 Shop
 

Happy to announce the PP issue got solved "by timeout" (180 day rule).
Thanks to everybody for your support with this, and sorry for the inconvenience and delay caused by it all.

We're considering whether to offer a different product via PayPal (after approval by PP), somthing like "download of all documentation, project files and schematics", with only a sidenote that we will grant a rebate in same amount on the price of final product Neo900 device.

cheers
jOERG

Re: questions regarding Neo900 Shop
 

As soon as this possibility of re-enabling funds via paypal is concrete...
let us know...
it will then mean just the time taken to shunt funds via that platform...

So happy that things are coming back to normal....

Re: questions regarding Neo900 Shop
 

Hello,

Please note that although neo900.org and my.neo900.org have an IPv6 AAAA record in DNS (2a01:4f8:d16:270f::2) this has not been working for quite some time. It causes me a bit of difficulty accessing the website. If IPv6 can't be fixed easily, it'd be better to not advertise it in DNS. Thanks a lot!

Re: questions regarding Neo900 Shop
 

Hint: Hetzner recently uses link-local address fe80::1 as default IPv6 gateway:
You can test by pinging my own server at Hetzner (in another subnet, which will test that the default route is correct) :
Thanks!