You may be surprised at what categories of businesses are tagged as coming under the adult services industry. A business as benign as an internet Christian dating site will fall under the adult industry category – as will any religious based dating sites. It seems incongruous that these businesses are lumped into the same category as escort services, adult toy sales, adult videos and many others. Everyone in this grouping is considered high risk and must look to adult merchant processing.
Credit card processors and the processing banks are not the ones that place this moniker on the industry – it is the card associations themselves. The card associations have loyalty to the consumer and not to the merchant. They want to protect the consumer, and this is totally understandable. There are several reasons why an adult merchant is considered high risk.
The major obstacle is that sales are transmitted under the ‘card not present’ heading. This means that when a customer places an order on line it is difficult to ensure that the person calling is actually the legal card holder. When an unauthorized use of a credit card is determined, the merchant gets a chargeback. If he receives too many chargebacks – for any reason – the account can be closed and some processors even put a hold on the settlement until all sales have cleared. This can be a lengthy process.
A merchant can also be considered high risk if there are a huge amount of transactions. If the business requires that a customer pay a subscription or charges by the minute, it is high risk. It can even be high risk if it is a start-up. Also, as far as bank processing goes, the banking industry is extremely conservative. They like to keep their distance from anything topic that may seem controversial in their communities.
Yet with all this going against adult merchant processing, there is a high risk specialist that works with adult merchant processing accounts day in and day out. EMB offers high risk processing as long as you keep your chargebacks under the 3% allowance. They even have programs available that can help you with this challenge plus a word-class customer service department that is available 24/7/365 to assist in any way possible.
The approval rate with EMB is 95% which should be encouraging to you. Everything can be taken care of from gateways to multiple merchant identification numbers. The fees are some of the lowest in the high risk industry and there is never an application fee.