facts! am going through this right now, everyone is rejecting me for not having SSN and shopify is taking their sweet f*****g time with enabling stripe as a payment method
Hi everyone - I would lie to jump in here and say that we are so so so many non-US residents with total legit US businesses (LLC or else) with EIN and ITIN, facing exact same issue. It has become (almost) IMPOSSIBLE to have a payment gateway provider to accept process online stores payments (Shopify / Woo Commerce/ BigCommerce etc), generally for Dropshipping activities. The nature of this business model is deemed high risk (and is on same list as Adult industry, ECB selling, guns & ammo etc), imlpies statistically very high rate of charge backs & refunds, are deemed selling "poor" products mainly from China - AND on top of that if owner is non US resident and has no SSN, it means there is not score credit and it is impossible to check his history as regards money-laundering and criminal records.
So basically, dropshopping + no stocks in the US (= zero assets) + no SSN (= no checkable history) = high risk of high charge backs/refunds + non resident owner (where are you if there is a legal issue ?) ======== rejection from payment gateways.
It has become a nightmare for everybody.
And there is an awful MASSIVE wave of accounts closed, one after one non stop sine last year. And those non resident on US who opened an online store before regulations became very strict are exposed to such random closure as soon as the provider will run checks and realize there is no SSN.
I know of a Portuguese friend in this case, he had several stores on Shopify thru US LLC and being non resident. 100% compliant, pays taxes everything. Well they closed all his shops last month , no explanation. He has no more source of income.
Thats how horrible it has became.
So open a shop from where you are, and go global.
I stayed with stripe. Almost impossible to find another one if there is not a us resident director or signee.
Stripe currently rejects new applicants if non US applicants and if they do Dropshipping in the US thru LLC. And the old ones .... expect high risk of closure in the future if they run checks. With no explanations.
