I’m curious, why did every payment processor drop you? Did they see “mushroom” and assume you were selling psilocybin mushrooms or something?
It’s a high risk industry, no doubt there have been plenty of scammers out there but the fact we sell magic mushroom spores for the microscope is enough to be alienated by every card processor and their insurers.
It’s fine though, we make it work - it hasn’t stopped our growth and we’ve amassed enough trust from customers to pay via the other methods!
*Edid: Shopify, not PayPal said that about spores into the arm, not Stripe!
We wouldn’t go back to card payments if we could. We save a fortune by paying 0% processing fees, have more control and are protected by a regulated UK bank instead of companies like Stripe or PayPal. We are very lucky!
And hey, maybe you in particular have cracked the code in how to ship spores in syringes that only inject into slides and not say, a prepared cultivation point. But I am 0 percent surprised payment processors noped out.
The other side is risk, meaning industries that have an above average chargeback (fraud) rate. Many times these industries overlap - porn for instance. Lots of stolen credit card numbers are used to by porn, but also legitimate purchases can easily end up as a chargeback. The classic example is that someone buys porn on their credit card and then their partner finds out. Instead of admitting they bought porn, they claim someone must have stolen their credit card to save face.
But we basically never had issues with chargebacks. Even when we used PayPal and Stripe for two years, we only had two chargebacks and we disputed one of them and won through PayPal as we proved it was fraudulent.