Mass PayPal Bans of Internet Marketing Products & WarriorPlus Gaining Popularity

by Chris Munch, 14th March 2019

If you haven’t been living under a rock, you probably noticed that vendors and affiliates are moving over to the WarriorPlus platform… But why?

PayPal has recently been closing and limiting the accounts of some major hitters in the online marketing space. Some of which seemingly haven’t done anything wrong. Vendors and affiliates are scared of losing there accounts.

What could be causing these shutdowns?

The current theory is that PayPal Adaptive Payments helps Paypal connect a chain of payments from one user to another and if there’s a risky user in the chain you could get connected and lose your account. There are numerous stories of Paypal shutting down accounts without explanation or with poor explanations and not allowing any appeals and keeping locking up your account balance for 6 months. The vast majority of these stories are related to the adaptive payments system.

Many of the platforms in the IM launch space are using PayPal Adaptive Payments. It’s what makes “instant commissions” possible. Now, it’s not that instant commissions or PayPal Adaptive are “bad” per se. It’s just that it might “connect” you to another user who has potentially broken PayPal’s TOS or even the law… or just something they consider high risk.

It’s all speculation at this point, but the evidence points strongly in this direction, and insider sources have confirmed this is what they are hearing from higher up PayPal reps. Paypal’s risk management department doesn’t seem to quite understand how the affiliate marketing instant payment platforms work, or they have just become stricter (and essentially a lot of these platforms contain products that may break PayPal ToS, or at least appear high risk). There’s been mixed opinions from payment platforms on whether Paypal likes Adaptive payments or not.

What Can You Do?

Avoiding using adaptive payments on any platform will help you, and also you should heavily vet your affiliates and the products you promote. Clickbank uses it’s own Paypal so there’s no risk there, and WarriorPlus uses a ‘wallet’ feature which protects you. JVZoo has also just launched something similar in response to the PayPal issue, as well as other alternative merchant accounts.

WarriorPlus Gaining Popularity

WarriorPlus has had a “Wallet” feature since 2014, but it’s really starting to gain popularity as vendors became worried about PayPal ‘connection’ issue and many people jumped to WarriorPlus over the last 2 months for this reason, although the majority of the larger IM launches remain on JVZoo, with some also on Clickbank. Paykickstart has also gradually gained a little popularity in the IM space.

WarriorPlus has also announced that they are working on a feature where they will be the “merchant of record” and accept payment on the behalf of certain trusted vendors, so that vendors can bypass using PayPal altogether.

WarriorPlus, Clickbank & JVZoo also vet offers against before they are allowed on their network, but you should still do your own due diligence on what you promote, especially if using instant commissions, since it could connect you to a risky offer or vendor. There’s certainly an issue at the moment with PayPal trusting what is going on in the IM space. Ultimately any product making income claims can be seen as high risk by Paypal, although some of the bans don’t seem to be related to this and are quite peculiar.

While it’s unfortunate that people are losing their PayPal accounts, the silver lining here is that the industry as a whole will benefit from these changes…

They are the growing pains we must face as marketers. And if the marketplace becomes a cleaner place with better quality products and fewer shady products, fake income claims, etc. as a result — then we will all benefit in the long run. Regardless Paypal has had a reputation for a long time at being trigger happy with banning merchants without explanation or recorse.

And while Paypal is known to be exceptionally aggressive with shutdowns, the same thing can happen with Stripe and other merchant accounts. So being aware of this risk and doing what you can to minimize it and having a plan B in place is important.