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Account suspension FAQ

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Summary

Before your first payout, we review your account. See our review process here. If we detect fraudulent sales, clear violations of our Terms of Service, or signs that you're attempting to launder money, spam the platform, or test the site's security, your account will be suspended. In some cases, we may also refund your customers. You'll have the option to appeal the suspension or request account deletion.


If your account is reviewed by us and we verify it, you're good. You'll get your first payout within seven days of your review, and we won't bother you again. Like, probably ever.


Once you're reviewed and verified, your account is safe from suspension unless:

  • You have an extremely high chargeback rate that becomes unsustainable for us to support your sales.
  • You refund all your sales that you've ever made, putting us into debt.
  • You violate our Terms of Service (or continue to do so after being asked to stop).
  • Stripe or PayPal (or our other banking partners) decide that you are in violation of their Terms of Service and prohibit us from working with you.

As a small company, Gumroad has to follow the rules of our banking partners and payment processors to keep operating. Sometimes, following these rules means we have to remove creators from the platform, even when we don't want to.


For creators, this means your account must comply with our Terms of Service for us to process payments on your behalf and pay out your earnings. By creating a Gumroad account, you are therefore subject our Terms and agree that we can suspend your account and refund sales if and when necessary (see Section 8).

We encourage you to read these Terms before creating an account. If your account violates them, it will be suspended, and your balance may be refunded depending on the policy that we are enforcing and potential chargeback risks.


We understand that from a creator's standpoint, a suspension may seem arbitrary, unfair, and cold. We do our best to bring humanity, empathy, and honesty to the relationships that we have with our creators, but sadly, in the world of online payments, there is no nice way to end a payment processing relationship.


This page offers explanations for why an account will be suspended and will attempt to dispel any misinformation you may have encountered elsewhere online.


We, unfortunately, have to stay rather general on this page, because giving away specific policy details is, frankly, a terrible idea in an online world full of fairly-clever scammers.

Reason 1: Terms of Service Violations

Gumroad's Terms of Service can be found here:

Terms of Service


And our list of goods that cannot be sold through Gumroad is here: Prohibited Products and Activities and in less legal terms here: Things That Are Not Allowed on Gumroad


If you are using Gumroad in a way that violates our ToS, or selling a product that we are not authorized to sell (common offenders include PLR ebooks, graphic pornography, services, credit repair products, tickets to events, health products, unlicensed software you didn't create, or unlicensed electronics), we have to suspend your account. In general, you cannot resell products that you didn't create. However, you can be an affiliate for another Gumroad creator—learn about that here.


Because spammers love misusing our platform, we also will have to suspend your account if it appears that you are using Gumroad as a means of manipulating search engine results.

What now?

If your entire account and sales violate our Terms of Service, we cannot allow you back on the platform. However, if only a single product is in violation and you agree to remove it and sell different types of products, we may allow you to return. If you've made previous purchases, we can resend them or restore download access.


Depending on the policies you have violated, we may not be able to pay you out. We do our best to get you paid, but sometimes we truly aren't allowed to.


We will speak to you directly in these instances about what will happen with your existing sales.

Reason 2: High-Risk and Fraudulent Sales

Every account on Gumroad is reviewed by our Risk team and processors before payouts can begin, to ensure we only process payments for safe, legitimate accounts.. We explain this process in further detail on the following pages:

If your account is marked by high rates of suspicious payments or evidence that your sales were made fraudulently and/or with compromised payment sources (i.e. stolen credit cards, hacked PayPal accounts), we have to suspend it, and we cannot pay you for these sales.

If there are legitimate sales in your balance, we will pay you out for those.

"Why me? I didn't do anything wrong. Why should I be punished for my customers' activities?"

This is a common, very understandable response to this kind of suspension. You might not be doing anything wrong - you may be selling an ebook about world peace, and donating all of your profits to blind orphans, but if your account is the source of high amounts of fraudulent payments, then the only thing we can do to enforce the policies of our partners is to cut off the fraud at its source, which in this case would be your products.

Think about it like this - it's not a great analogy, but this is how our banking partners view the situation:

Mrs. Gumroad manages a supermarket, and you are her new employee. You invite someone from outside the store to come in and buy from the section of the store that you've just recently organized. That person comes in, steals a bunch of stuff, smashes up the store, and runs away.

What can Mrs. Gumroad do in this situation besides fire you? Again, not a great analogy but it's how we have to operate.

What now?

Depending on your situation, your account may be reviewed again. We invite you to ask us to re-review your account because we do make mistakes. If we find that our review was flawed we will allow your account back onto Gumroad. If not, we will refund your sales and ask you to find a different platform for your sales.

Reason 3: High Chargeback Amounts

To learn how Gumroad deals with chargebacks, you can read this rather lengthy article. It offers tips on how to avoid chargebacks and how to help us if your customer issues one.

In short though, if your account racks up a high number of chargebacks, your account is categorized as high-risk, and we are not allowed to further process your sales or payouts.

Why?

Let's say you have $1,000 in sales and you incur $100 in chargebacks. You now have a 10% chargeback-to-sales volume rate, meaning 10% of all of your sales have resulted in chargebacks. Moreover, as per our ToS, Gumroad swallows the resulting penalties that are attached to chargebacks. Theoretically, if we were to continue processing your sales, we would continue to accrue penalties on your behalf.

From the viewpoint of our partners, this is unsustainable and we are forced to suspend your sales.

"Why me? I didn't do anything wrong. Why should I be punished for my customers' activities?"

Again, a totally understandable and completely valid point. But, to restate - we have to enforce the risk policies of our partners quickly and effectively. The chargebacks are originating from your account, and suspension is the only way to solve the issue, from our partners' perspective.

If your account has been suspended for a high chargeback rate, we are forced to hold onto your balance for 30-45 days to accommodate for further chargebacks. After this period, we will pay you the remaining balance in your account, if given clearance by our banking partners.

Reason 4: Your account was rejected by our partners

By entering your payout information, you’re setting up an account with Stripe and/or PayPal. They also review your account to assess risk. If they've had issues with your account in the past, they may not let us pay you.


For example:

  • You have been suspended from PayPal in the past and created a new account with us
  • Your bank account has been connected to fraud in the past that Stripe has had to deal with

What now?

If this is the case, we will forward your case to the support staff of either PayPal or Stripe. We may also put you in an email thread with them to answer any questions that they have. If they do not allow us to pay you, then unfortunately we have no way to send you money. The easiest solution in this example would be to refund your sales and contact your customers to pay you via an alternate route.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1. Why doesn't Gumroad inform users that their account is suspended?

A1: A vast majority of the accounts we suspend (around 50,000/month) are created by actual scammers or spammers. To inform them via email that their attempts to defraud us were unsuccessful would effectively amount to us offering them a Mulligan.


We have found it is more effective for us to allow users to email us for more information after their accounts have been suspended. We understand that suspension often comes as a nasty surprise, and we apologize for the seeming rudeness.


Q2: I have read online that Gumroad keeps my customers' money after my account has been suspended.

A2: We're not entirely sure how this rumor got started, but rest assured, it's not true. If we were doing this, a few things would happen:


1. Customers would issue chargebacks at a rate that would quickly bankrupt us

2. Creators would sue us so much that we'd be bankrupted

3. Our payment processors would get wind of it, and boot us from their platforms

4. We'd get a visit from the FBI for extortion


Since not a single one of these things has happened since we opened our digital doors in 2011, it should be evident that this is not how we do business.


If your account has been suspended and sales have been refunded, we are more than happy to provide proof of those refunds to your customers.


Q3: Can I protest my suspension?

A3: Absolutely. To be clear, we don't enjoy suspending accounts, and sometimes our review process can be flawed. Contact us at support@gumroad.com and we will inform you as to why your account was suspended. We will then ask for pertinent information that may help us get your account back and running.


Q4: Why doesn't Gumroad provide me with specific reasons why my account was suspended?

A4: The Internet is a pretty awful place when it comes to fraud and risk management, and unfortunately the more specific information we give out about our risk and fraud detection, the more information there is that's able to leak to fraudsters trying to make money off of us.