PayPal restored services to dotDB. Here’s why it dropped it.

It seems like PayPal could have prevented this with proper communication.

Last week I wrote about how dotDB’s PayPal account was canceled and the funds were frozen.

PayPal wouldn’t give any reason for the cancellation at first. But dotDB got the account back and an explanation: lots of chargeback requests.

I’m a bit baffled by this. Many chargeback requests and disputes are certainly a reason for a payment provider to suspend an account. But it makes sense to warn the merchant so it can improve these rates. Stripe even provides an add-on service to help prevent excessive chargebacks. And what would the harm have been to let dotDB know why its account was terminated?

dotDB is instituting changes to prevent excessive refund requests.

For example, it offered a seven-day trial that converted to a paid plan if people didn’t cancel. Apparently, many people were signing up for this and intending to cancel but forgetting. So dotDB is nixing the free trials.

In an unrelated change, the company is implementing measures to prevent scraping. The company says people have been extracting data for their own products or services, and this has led to technical issues. So it will now restrict the number of lookups on free accounts. (It already offers plans with API access for people who want to build tools on top of the data.)

If you haven’t used it before, dotDB shows how many TLDs a domain is taken in, as well as variations of the domain, as well as variations of the domain. If you pay for the Expert level, you can also see how the domains are used. This is very helpful. If a domain is registered in ten extensions but they are all parked, this isn’t as valuable as if some are used as websites.