Your payment processor froze your account. What to do in the first 48 hours.

The email arrives without warning and it is usually four lines long. Your account has been placed under review. Payouts are on hold. A decision will follow. No reason given, and often no reason ever given.

What you do in the next two days matters more than what you do in the next two months. Here is the order that works.

Hour one: stop the bleeding you can control

Turn off paid traffic. Every ad still running is buying orders you may not be able to collect on and cannot refund cleanly. This is the single most expensive mistake merchants make in the first day.

Do not stop shipping. It is the instinct, and it is wrong. Unshipped orders become chargebacks, chargebacks become evidence, and evidence is what turns a review into a termination. If the goods are paid for and you can ship them, ship them.

Write down the date and the exact wording. You will be repeating this timeline for weeks and memory drifts.

Day one: find out which of the three things happened

"Frozen" covers three different situations with different outcomes, and the language in the notice usually tells you which.

A review with a hold. Payouts pause while underwriting looks at something. Often triggered by a volume spike, a chargeback cluster, or a product page somebody flagged. These frequently end with money released.

A reserve. They keep a percentage of your volume for a fixed period. Annoying, survivable, and normally a sign they intend to keep processing for you.

A termination. The account is closed. Funds are typically held for a period tied to chargeback exposure, which is often around 90 to 180 days depending on your agreement. Read your agreement rather than guessing.

Ask which one it is, in writing. Ask for the reason code. You may not get an answer, but the request itself creates a record and it costs nothing.

The thing not to do, however tempting

Do not open a new merchant account under a slightly different business name, a relative's name, or a new entity, and carry on as though nothing happened.

If your account was terminated for cause, the acquirer can add your business and its principals to the MATCH list, Mastercard's file of terminated merchants. Entries stay for five years. Only the acquirer who filed it can remove it early, in narrow circumstances, and Mastercard does not take appeals directly from merchants.

Applying elsewhere while listed, or applying under a name chosen to avoid the listing, turns a recoverable processing problem into a five-year one and gives every future underwriter a reason to decline you on sight. The merchants who end up genuinely unbankable almost always got there this way, not from the original termination.

What actually gets funds released

Underwriters are managing risk, not punishing you. Everything that reduces their exposure helps.

• Proof of fulfilment. Tracking numbers against the held orders, showing the goods exist and went out.
• A clean chargeback picture. Current ratio, and what you have changed. Clearer billing descriptors and faster refunds both count.
• Product claims that match the product. If your pages promise a health outcome you cannot substantiate, that is often the real reason, and it is the one you can fix in an afternoon.
• Answering fast. Slow responses read as an inability to operate.

Be businesslike. The person reading your file did not choose you personally and has a queue.

The reason it happened is usually upstream of you

Most terminations in regulated categories are not about your conduct. They are about where you were placed. A merchant selling research peptides through a processor whose terms prohibit research chemicals was never going to survive an underwriting review, regardless of how clean the operation was.

That is worth knowing because it decides what you do next. If the account was fine and something specific went wrong, fix the specific thing. If your category was never permitted where you were, no amount of good behaviour was going to hold it, and you are looking at getting placed properly rather than getting reinstated.

The lesson every merchant learns exactly once

A single processor is a single point of failure, and in a high-risk category it is the most likely part of the business to fail.

A second, approved, connected processor sitting idle is not an expense. It is the difference between a bad week and the end of the business. Merchants who have been through this once never run without one again. The point of writing it down here is to save somebody the first time.

Approved Commerce sets merchants up with card processing underwritten to their actual category, with a backup ready. We cannot promise any bank will approve you, because that decision is not ours to make. What we can do is stop you being placed somewhere that was never going to hold. Tell us what you sell and what happened.