CBD and credit card processing: easy for corporate, hard for small employee owned businesses.

A CBD payment processor must be capable of dealing with high-risk transactions. The reason is that our new industry is prone to frauds and charge-backs. Since the legal grey area the Fed leaves us in, only a handful of payment processing services will be willing to take the risks associated with CBD-related transaction.

Double standards

Of course, big companies and corporations, are able to function perfectly within the credit card payment system, since their capital gives them more leverage with financial institutions. But it’s not the same for smaller businesses, and we all know how important online shopping has become, these days. It’s normal and understandable: after all, life moves fast, and we’re all pretty damn busy. Often, we just don’t have the time to get in the car, stroll through traffic and wait in line at the shop just to get one specific product, even if it’s for our own good.

So, by preventing certain businesses from the access to online credit card payment (sometimes even by blocking them altogether), the credit card system is discouraging customers from consuming small batch, artisanal, organic products. Instead, it encourages them to turn to inferior grade, machine-made stuff made from big companies. These companies frequently care more about profit than about their customers and have very little real contact with the consumers of their products.

Two-stage checkout

Unfortunately, unlike big companies, small business owners, fall in that category of companies that most digital credit card providers refuse to serve. Many companies, like ours, attempted to use many different pathways, even turning to the most popular online paying systems, like Paypal and Square, and received a ban from there as well, as an answer. Many companies are only left with the option of a two-stage checkout. In other words, when making a purchase from our website, our customers have to take proceed to paying the order through a separate platform, like Google Play or Venmo, in order for us to receive their payment. A first time customer might have to create their account on these platforms before paying. This increases significantly the amount of time people will spend on placing an order.

Another aspect to consider is that, because of this pathway, your credit card information is not directly tied to the order in itself, so there is no third party processing of the payment. Of course, we understand that this may create issues of trust in some of the people who are new to a company’s products and are considering testing them. So, since every time customers decide to go through that process, they are also showing trust and faith in a company and their products. This is why we want thank each and every one of you for your patience, and apologize for any inconvenience this two-stage checkout process might cause. As of now, unfortunately, this is the only legitimate way for us to provide you with our high-quality, handmade products.

Conclusion

We have to remember, no matter how high the quality of a product can be, if the customers have a hard time getting access to it, it will just be as that product was not accessible at all. And people will be left with inferior alternatives or, in the worst scenario, literally with snake oil. We strive and do our best to provide our customers quick, simple and hassle-free payment solutions on our website but, until credit institutions will decide that also our type of business is good enough for them, we hope our customers will bear with us, knowing that, even though it costs them a little more time to place an order, they are supporting a high-quality, small batch craft product created by an employee-owned small business.