14-day shutdown recovery plan

What do you do in the first 24 hours?

Do not argue yet. Preserve the record, stop making the exposure worse, and find out what actually triggered the action. Merchants who skip diagnosis usually re-apply into the same decline.

• Save every notice, email, and portal message with timestamps.
• Export transaction and dispute history while you still have access.
• Stop new charges you cannot fulfil during a hold.
• Tell customers what is happening before they ask.

Days 2–4: identify the trigger

Triggers cluster into a handful of causes. Work through them in order of how often they occur rather than how likely they feel.

• A content scan that found claims, dosing, or a prohibited catalog item.
• A dispute rate crossing a monitoring threshold.
• A mismatch between what was described at boarding and what is on the site now.
• Sudden volume or ticket-size change without notice.
• Missing or expired documentation.

Days 5–9: fix the underlying issue

Fix the cause in the place it lives — the site, the catalog, the refund flow, or the operations — and keep evidence of the change with dates. A fix you cannot show is a fix that did not happen, as far as the next reviewer is concerned.

• Rewrite or remove flagged copy and record the before/after.
• Remove SKUs you cannot document a pathway for.
• Repair the descriptor, receipts, and refund path if disputes were the trigger.
• Publish missing policy pages.

Days 10–14: rebuild the file and re-apply

Re-apply with a file that leads with the diagnosis and the fix. Disclose the prior action up front — it is discoverable, and volunteering it with evidence of remediation reads very differently from having it found.

• A short written summary: what happened, why, what changed, when.
• Updated site and policies live before you submit.
• Complete entity, banking, and ownership documents.
• Recent statements, including the affected period.

What about held funds and reserves?

Holds follow their own timeline, which is usually independent of whether you re-apply elsewhere. Keep the correspondence organised, keep fulfilling orders you have already been paid for, and do not let the funds question stall the remediation work — the two run in parallel.