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

The email arrives without warning, and it's usually four lines long. Your account has been placed under review. Payouts are on hold. A decision will follow. There's no reason given, and often there never is.

What you do in the next two days matters more than what you do in the next two months. This 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 can't refund cleanly. Leaving ads on is the most expensive mistake merchants make on day one.

Don't stop shipping. Stopping feels like the safe move, and it's wrong. Unshipped orders turn into chargebacks, chargebacks turn into 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'll 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. The wording of the notice usually tells you which one you're in.

A review with a hold. Payouts pause while underwriting looks at something. The trigger is often a volume spike, a cluster of chargebacks, or a product page somebody flagged. These often end with the money released.

A reserve. They keep a percentage of your volume for a fixed period. It's annoying but survivable, and it normally means they plan to keep processing for you.

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

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

The thing not to do, however tempting

Don't 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 the entry can remove it early, and only in narrow circumstances. Mastercard doesn't take appeals directly from merchants.

Applying elsewhere while you're listed, or under a name picked to dodge the listing, turns a processing problem you could have recovered from into a five-year one. It also gives every future underwriter a reason to decline you on sight. The merchants who end up unbankable almost always got there this way. The original termination rarely does it on its own.

What gets funds released

Underwriters are managing their risk. They aren't trying to punish you, so anything 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. Your current ratio and what you've changed. Clearer billing descriptors and faster refunds both count.
• Product claims that match the product. If your pages promise a health outcome you can't back up, that's often the real reason, and you can fix it in an afternoon.
• Answering fast. Slow replies look like a business that can't operate.

Keep it businesslike. The person reading your file didn't pick you out personally, and they have a queue.

The reason it happened is usually upstream of you

Most terminations in regulated categories come down to where you were placed, not how you ran the business. A merchant selling research peptides through a processor whose terms prohibit research chemicals was never going to survive an underwriting review, however clean the operation was.

That decides what you do next. If the account was fine and something specific went wrong, fix that thing. If your category was never permitted where you were, good behaviour was never going to save the account. What you need is to get placed properly, and reinstatement won't give you that.

The lesson every merchant learns exactly once

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

Think of a second approved processor, connected and sitting idle, as the thing that makes this a bad week instead of the end of the business. Merchants who've been through this once never run without one again. We're writing it down to save you from learning it the first time.

Approved Commerce sets merchants up with card processing underwritten to their real category, with a backup ready. We can't promise any bank will approve you, because that decision isn't 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.