PayPal reviews
PayPal has one of the widest review splits in payments. Business reviewers on G2 rate it around 4.4 out of 5. Trustpilot has it at about 1.5 across nearly 37,000 reviews, and the Better Business Bureau at 1.1, with more than 28,000 complaints logged over three years. Almost all of that gap is one subject: accounts limited and funds held, which has also been the subject of class-action litigation.
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1.4K Google reviews
Twelve years of frozen-funds threads, still being added to.
What people say about PayPal elsewhere
Summaries of the public reviews and discussion on other platforms, written by our editors and dated. None of it is counted in the rating this site publishes.
Google reviews
PayPal on Google
Listed on Google as PayPal Corporate Headquarters, 2211 N First Street, San Jose
- 5 star
- 399
- 4 star
- 60
- 3 star
- 39
- 2 star
- 44
- 1 star
- 849
1,391 reviews on the San Jose corporate listing, averaging 2.4, with 849 of them one star. It is the largest and the angriest review record of anything in this directory, and most of it is not merchants. It is buyers: disputes decided against them, transfers reversed, identity verification that failed, an eBay purchase that never arrived. Read as consumer feedback it says PayPal's dispute process is unpredictable and its support is hard to escalate. Read as merchant feedback it says almost nothing, because the merchants who lost an account do not usually review a head office. The five-star reviews, and there are 399, mostly come from long-standing users who treat PayPal as the safest way to pay a stranger, which is the same conclusion the complaints are arguing with. Nothing here should be weighed as heavily as PayPal's own merchant terms and the Reddit record on account limits.
What reviewers praise
- Still the default for paying strangersThe five-star reviews are almost all about trust in the buyer protection rather than about any feature.
What reviewers flag
- Mostly buyers, not sellersThe bulk of the one-star reviews are consumers describing a dispute or a reversed payment. Useful, but not a merchant sample.
- Disputes decided without a hearingThe most repeated complaint on both sides: conflicting answers from different agents, and a decision arriving with no reasoning attached.
- Length of relationship counts for nothingReviewers of fifteen and twenty years' standing describe being treated identically to a new account when something is flagged.
In their words
I've been a PayPal customer for over 20 years, and apparently that means absolutely nothing to them.
Read it in full
PayPal has been the most trustworthy payment system that was available for the last 15 plus years.
Read it in full
What Reddit says about PayPal
r/Entrepreneur, r/smallbusiness, r/dropship, r/Bricklink · Twelve years of frozen-funds threads, still being added to.
One thread from 2013 still defines this. A seller of ten years, doing 50 to 100 thousand dollars a year, launched a pre-order, and PayPal froze over 70,000 dollars for 180 days. It drew 881 points and 357 comments, and the reply that stuck is that this sits entirely within PayPal's terms and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything written since repeats the shape: 200,000 dollars held for four months on crypto mining hardware, an eBay seller permanently limited two months in, a Bricklink seller deactivated with no path back. The practical advice Reddit has converged on is not to leave PayPal, because for many sellers that is not an option. It is to treat PayPal as a payment rail rather than a bank: sweep the balance to your bank daily, keep a second processor live, and never let a launch or a pre-order concentrate months of revenue in one account. Dropshipping threads add the 21-day hold on new or irregular sellers as a thing to plan for rather than argue with.
What keeps getting raised
- The holds are within the termsThe most upvoted reply in the canonical thread, and the reason legal threats in these threads go nowhere.
- Growth is the triggerThe accounts that get frozen are the ones that just did something unusual: a pre-order, a launch, a good month. Long history does not protect you.
- Sweep the balance dailyThe most repeated practical advice on Reddit: PayPal is not a bank account, so do not leave money in it.
- Keep a second processor liveThreads consistently end with people setting up Stripe, Authorize.net or Shopify Payments alongside rather than instead.
Threads worth reading
- Paypal just froze over $70,000 in my account - Say they won't return it for 180 days.
r/Entrepreneur · 27 November 2013 · 881 upvotes · 357 comments
The canonical thread. Ten-year account, six figures a year, frozen after a pre-order launch. 357 comments, and the advice in them is still what people give today.
- Stripe, has now got a new customer. Bravo PayPal.
r/Entrepreneur · 19 November 2015 · 308 upvotes · 251 comments
A seller walking through the moment a growing account got flagged, and 251 comments of people describing the same month.
- 200k+ USD Frozen by PayPal. We sell crypto mining hardware.
r/Entrepreneur · 22 February 2018 · 17 upvotes · 69 comments
Four months on 200,000 dollars with the goods already delivered and the paperwork supplied. A higher-risk category, and the pattern is identical.
- PayPal Deactivated
r/Bricklink · 19 February 2025 · 19 upvotes · 59 comments
A permanent limitation on a marketplace seller, with the account and app both confirming it and support unable to say why. Recent and ordinary.
- PayPal Problems Dropshippers Face (and How to Actually Fix Them)
r/dropship · 23 November 2025 · 6 upvotes · 20 comments
The 21-day hold on new or irregular sellers, written as something to plan around rather than complain about.
Comments worth quoting
This is why I don't use PayPal. This sort of thing is completely within their T&C and there is fuck all you can do about it.
Read it in full
I could understand it if I was a new business, but... I've been a member for over 10 years, selling anywhere from $50k-$100k a year. Very, very few complaints.
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Paypal is not a bank account, therefor I never keep more than 10 dollars on the account, I transfer it to my bank account right away. I just use it to receive money.
Read it in full
PayPal reviews
Reviews submitted directly to this site by merchants who use PayPal, moderated before they appear. Separate from the Google and Reddit summaries above.
No merchant has reviewed PayPal here yet
Reviews are written by merchants who use the processor and are moderated before they appear.
Write the first reviewWhat the third-party review record shows
As of August 2026, PayPal sits at roughly 4.4 out of 5 on G2 from business reviewers, against about 1.5 across nearly 37,000 Trustpilot reviews and 1.1 on the Better Business Bureau, where more than 28,000 complaints have been logged over a three-year window alongside about 1,700 reviews. Capterra lands in the middle. The sample sizes on the negative side are large enough that selection bias explains the direction but not the magnitude.
Sort the reviews by subject and they stop contradicting each other. Reviews about checkout, conversion and getting paid by an international customer are positive and numerous. Reviews about what happens when PayPal's risk system takes an interest in you are the opposite, and there are tens of thousands of them.
This is not only a review-site phenomenon. Consolidated class-action litigation has alleged that PayPal froze accounts and held funds for extended periods without adequate notice, with a class period running from roughly 2019 through 2024 and the effect falling hardest on small businesses and individual sellers. Whatever its outcome, the existence of a case built on the same facts the reviews describe is worth more than any star rating here.
Themes across public reviews
Pros
- Buyer recognition lifts checkout conversion, and reviewers selling cross-border cite it as the single reason they keep the button
- Venmo comes bundled in the US, which reaches a younger customer base most processors cannot offer
- Setup is immediate with no application, so a new seller can take a card the day they launch
- Reviewers describe the invoicing and payment-request tools as good enough to bill clients without other software
- Coverage of currencies and countries is broader than most processors offer without a local entity
- The buyer protection that sellers dislike is also why hesitant customers complete a purchase at all
Cons
- Account limitation and deactivation with no clear reason is the dominant complaint across every consumer-facing platform
- Held balances are described as lasting weeks or months, with submitted documentation failing to release them
- Class-action litigation has alleged extended fund freezes without adequate notice or due process for merchants
- Reviewers report being unable to reach anyone with authority to reverse a limitation decision
- Sellers describe the dispute process as weighted toward the buyer, including on delivered and tracked orders
- Standard rates are high against a dedicated merchant account, and higher again on cross-border and currency conversion
- Funds accumulating inside PayPal rather than in your own bank are exposed to any limitation decision
What the review record will not tell you
The reviews will not tell you your own risk of being limited, because it depends on things a rating cannot see: your category, your dispute rate, how fast your volume grows, and whether what you sell matches what you told PayPal you sell. Most merchants are never limited. The ones who are describe an experience with no proportionate remedy, and there are enough of them to have supported years of litigation. Both facts are true at once.
The practical conclusion is about where your money sits rather than whether to use PayPal at all. Offer it, because the conversion case is real and well documented. Then sweep the balance to your own bank on a short cycle, keep documentation ready before you are asked for it, and make sure a limitation would be an inconvenience rather than a shutdown. A merchant account underwritten in your own name, such as Helcim or Stax, gives you a relationship to escalate through, which is precisely what these reviews say PayPal does not.
What reviewers say in their own words
Excerpts below are quoted from reviews published on third-party platforms, with a link to each source. They are not reviews submitted to this site, and they do not count toward the PayPal rating shown above. Three seller accounts, chosen because they are merchants rather than shoppers, which most of PayPal's negative pool is not. Each describes the same sequence the class-action litigation alleges: a limitation, then a balance held.
- "About 2 years ago Paypal decided to limit my account, I tried to resolve the issue with no success. About a year ago they decided to close my account and they will send me an email with directions to refund my balance within 180 days."
a seller, 1 out of 5, ConsumerAffairs, 2026 - "switched to a personal account from a business account based on the customer support advice to resolve account transaction challenges, shortly after, my business account was frozen"
a seller, 1 out of 5, ConsumerAffairs, 2026 - "PayPal after review permanently limited my account."
a seller whose account had been hacked, 1 out of 5, Card Payment Options, 2026
Frequently asked questions
- Are these PayPal reviews verified?
- The figures on this page come from G2, Capterra, Trustpilot and the Better Business Bureau and were current as of August 2026. G2 and Capterra verify reviewers before publishing. Trustpilot is open and the BBB publishes complaints alongside reviews, which is part of why both run so low. None of these are reviews submitted to this site. Anything in the list above is a review a merchant wrote here and our moderators approved, rated on pricing, support, ease of use, features and reliability. Our own score is computed from those approved reviews only, never borrowed from a platform.
- Why is PayPal rated 4.4 by businesses and 1.5 by consumers?
- Because they are two different products sharing a brand. On G2 and Capterra the reviewer is a business evaluating checkout conversion, and PayPal genuinely delivers there: shoppers recognise the button and buy. On Trustpilot and the BBB the reviewer is usually someone whose account was limited or whose money was held, and that population includes both consumers and small sellers. A near three-star gap between the two is not two contradictory opinions about one thing. It is a good payment button attached to a risk operation that many people have had a bad experience with, and you will be exposed to both.
- What do PayPal reviewers complain about most?
- Account limitation and held funds, overwhelmingly. Reviewers describe accounts limited or deactivated with no clear reason, balances held for extended periods, and requests for documentation that do not resolve the hold once submitted. The practice has been the subject of consolidated class-action litigation alleging that PayPal froze accounts and held merchant funds for long periods without adequate notice or due process, covering a class period running from roughly 2019 to 2024. Second is support: reviewers consistently report being unable to reach anyone able to reverse a decision. Third is the dispute process, which sellers describe as weighted toward the buyer.
- Should you use PayPal as your main processor?
- Most merchants are better off treating it as an additional checkout option rather than as the account that holds their working capital. The business case for offering PayPal is strong and well evidenced: recognition lifts conversion, particularly on cross-border sales and with older shoppers, and Venmo comes with it in the US. The case against depending on it is the review record above. Add the button, and settle to a bank account you control quickly rather than accumulating a balance inside PayPal. If you want the PayPal and Venmo methods with a processor relationship somewhere else, <a href="/processor/braintree">Braintree</a> is PayPal-owned and offers both through a conventional gateway integration.
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