Does Venmo Have Buyer Protection?

Venmo shot to prominence with its solution to the money sending problem, enabling money to be sent to friends and family almost instantly and with low to zero fees. But does Venmo have buyer protection?

Venmo does have buyer protection but it must be applied for or the transaction be tagged as such to activate it. As long as you follow Venmo’s policies, this enables a full refund for the buyer or protection of funds already received in the case of a seller.

We’ll look at the rules around buying and selling using Venmo to see if it is possible to send and receive money for businesses in 2022, as well as have a close look at the common issues and problems as well as how to solve them.

Buying or Selling Merchandise, Goods or Services Using Venmo

As stated in their help section, Venmo was originally designed for the easy sharing of money between people who already know and trust each other. On the surface, this would mean that it wouldn’t work well in an arm’s length environment such as buying and selling goods.

However, Venmo has been working on expanding its offerings, and so you’ll need to be explicitly authorized to accept Venmo for purchases. This is done either by applying for a business profile or by tagging individual payments to a personal profile as commercial purchases.

You may have already noticed merchants and other retailers with Venmo signage, so it may seem obvious that there are business profiles or Venmo is good to be used in this type of situation.

However, you must make sure that Venmo is aware that your usage of Venmo is for business before doing so.

Venmo’s Protection Program

Venmo offers buyer protection only in limited situations, and in fact, unless it is specified, Venmo won’t offer any protection to a transaction by default.

This means that both the buyer and seller can have issues if they don’t follow Venmo’s policies.

For example, If you send a Venmo payment to an unauthorized business profile or another individual for a good or service without identifying the payment as for goods and services, Venmo will not offer any type of guarantee for the payment, meaning you could lose it.

As a seller, if you accept a Venmo payment for a good or service via your personal profile and the buyer didn’t identify a payment as for goods and services, this could cause issues with Venmo later. For example, they may review the payment, leading to it being reversed.

Not only will you lose the money at this point, but the item or service has long been sold as well.  

As an aside, Venmo offers no support for donation campaigns or for fund-raising for a non-profit.

An authorized Venmo business profile automatically applies Buyer Protection to all transactions.

What is Venmo’s Protection Program?

As laid out in a June 28 blogpost from 2021, Venmo states that payments tagged as for goods or services will be eligible for coverage under Venmo’s Purchase Protection Program.

This program gives confidence to the buyer and seller that losses may be covered if the transaction doesn’t go as expected.

Enabling this protection by tagging the transaction does add a small fee, as the seller will pay 1.9% of the transaction plus an additional 10 cents which is automatically deducted from the total amount sent.

This protection means that if a buyer sends a payment for a good or service, refunds are available if they don’t receive the item, or if the received product differs in some significant or material way as described by the seller. Shipping costs may also be covered.

Protections for the seller mean that if the seller can provide proof that they shipped the item or fulfilled the transaction, they will still keep the full amount.

In order to access any redress, your Venmo account must be in good standing, and you also must supply Venmo with the information required. 

This includes an attempt to resolve the issue directly with the seller, a response to Venmo’s request for documentation and other information within the time requested, a dispute opened with Venmo within 180 days of the date, and no recovery from another source (e.g. bank).

Keep in mind that Venmo monitors individual accounts for noncompliance, and if they suspect something is going on with an account, they may limit payments for up to 21 days.

These may include if a seller is new with Venmo or suddenly your account sees unusual payment amounts for your selling pattern. Even if the Venmo account was inactive for a while before the sale or the product or service can potentially cause dissatisfaction.

Going along with the final point above, if your account starts to receive multiple reported problems or requested refunds, this is almost certainly going to see your account blocked.