Payment hold? The first 48 hours, in order

Your payouts stopped, the money is sitting somewhere you can't touch, and the notice is written in risk-department. First, the plain version: a hold is your processor pausing payouts while it reviews your account. It is not a fine, and it is not automatically a closure — but what you do in the first two days genuinely matters. This page is general information, not legal advice.

What a hold actually is

• Withheld payouts are sales you already made whose deposits are paused. A rolling reserve is a percentage of each sale held back for a set period. Both are risk tools written into the merchant agreement you signed — the terms are in your own paperwork.
• Common triggers processors cite: a sudden volume spike, tickets much larger than your account's usual average, a jump in refunds or chargebacks, or a review of what the business actually sells versus what the application said.
• Only your processor can release a hold. Anyone who tells you otherwise — including anyone who contacts you offering to "get your money released" for a fee — should be treated as a scam until proven otherwise through your processor's official dashboard.

Hour one: read the actual notice

• Go to the source. Open the notice inside your processor's official dashboard or app — not just the email. Save or screenshot it with the date; it names the reason category and what is being requested.
• Write down three things: the amount held, the reason given, and exactly what documents or answers are requested. Vague worry is useless; that list is a work plan.

Then: gather before you call

• Processors typically ask for some combination of: business license or registration, recent bank statements for the business account, invoices or receipts for the flagged sales, and proof of delivery or service completion. Pull them before the call so the call is short.
• Match the paperwork to the trigger. Flagged for a big ticket? The invoice and the customer's signed authorization are the story. Volume spike? Be ready to explain the event, the promotion, the season — with dates.
• Respond through the processor's own channel (dashboard upload or the address in the notice), keep copies of everything you send, and note the date, time, and name attached to every conversation.

What not to do

• Don't open a second account to route around the hold. Processors treat that as evasion; it can turn a review into a termination and a listing that follows you to the next processor.
• Don't tell customers to dispute their charges to "get their money back that way" — chargebacks land on your account's record and make the underlying problem worse.
• Don't send documents to anyone who reached out to you first — not by email, text, or social message. Holds are public pain; impersonators work them. Verify every contact inside the official dashboard.
• Don't stop fulfilling orders reflexively. Unless the notice says otherwise, unfulfilled orders become refunds, and refunds become chargebacks — the exact metrics that triggered the review.

After the hold lifts

Most holds trace back to a mismatch between the account on paper and the business in real life — average ticket, sales mix, or category drifting from the application. Once payouts resume, that mismatch is worth understanding on paper, because it is also where fee surprises live. A statement read and an honest effective-rate check are the calm, after-the-fact version of the same questions the risk department just asked.