Paypal Trouble - Phase 1 extended

Paypal recently informed us that our company account has been frozen and after some failed attempts to contact them they explained that our phased payments system processed through Paypal is violating their terms of service. Apparently Paypal forbids any kind of pre-selling activity when payment and delivery of goods are more than 20 days apart. Also they imposed a funding reserve on our account effectively preventing us from actually buying image sensors and Microzeds with the Phase 1 payment as "security" reserve. Paypal claims this is required since pre-selling imposes a big risk on their liability as payment provider. This is especially interesting since indiegogo uses Paypal exclusively for all their crowd funding campaigns and therefore was also our payment provider for receiving the funds from our campaign - we have to say that everything worked flawlessly and we never had any problems with Paypal until today. Pretty much every single crowd funding campaign pre-sells goods on indiegogo (we actively decided against it and funded the development of the AXIOM Beta instead but we are still an exception) but for Paypal that does not seem to matter in detail - the 20 days rule between campaign end and delivery of goods is especially entertaining for crowd funding campaigns. We can only wonder.

Paypal Refunds & Alternatives

We are very sorry for the inconvenience this causes for the few backers who paid Phase 1 through Paypal recently. We are forced to refund your transfers and ask you to use alternative payment methods. We are now investigating Stripe for processing credit card payments and so far had a thoroughly positive experience with transferwise which we are already suggesting to use in our webshop for bank transfers from outside the EU. If you know any other option that could be a good fit for us, let us know!

Phase 1 extended

As we understand it is not the best time to ask for payments before Christmas and at the end of the year Phase 1 will stay open until at least the end of January. If you are a crowd funding supporter / voucher holder please make your Phase 1 payments soon. New voucher holders who did not participate in the crowd funding campaign but still want to acquire the AXIOM Beta hardware and who joined the preorder notification list will be invited to acquire a voucher and pay Phase 1 soon.