Visa & M/C vs Entheogenic Community
Have you ever tried to pay with a credit card at your favorite entheogenic website only to find there are no options for credit cards? Let me tell you that you are not alone. In fact, if your favorite vendor has not had their merchant account (credit card processing) suspended and or terminated, its just a matter of time. Visa & M/C started closing accounts as soon as kratom became under attack in September of 2016. Fast forward 2 years later and you will see that there are not many entheogenic vendors, and the majority of them can not process credit cards online or at all. The kratom scare put any vendors selling products that may contain psychoactive contents on a blacklist and banned us from ever taking credit cards here in the USA.
The only other option for accepting credit cards is applying for an offshore credit card processing account. Offshore accounts are very expensive and usually charge about 15-20% with a 10% rolling reserve ( hold 10% of the merchants revenue for 6 months ). It is impossible to keep prices low and stay in business with 25-30% of your profits going to an offshore credit card processor. In addition, customers may have to pay international banking fees and may be double charged. We have tried all the solutions above and to keep our shop alive and keep prices low we have settled with E-check, Cryptocurrency, credit card over the phone, Zelle, wire, Money order and check by mail.
Visa & M/C basically want to tell you how and what you can spend your hard earned money on. This is one of the main reasons we are so “pro-crypto”, its anonymous, there are no fraudulent chargebacks, product ships same or next day, and most importantly, you can use it however you want without scrutiny from “Big Brother”. If we are to keep the entheogenic community going strong we have to adapt to the current landscape. The use of cryptocurrency allows us to better serve our customers without banking limitations, higher fees and time delays.
In short: Visa and MasterCard claim that kratom and psychoactive products harms their brand. They prohibit the use of their service and have been known to impose fines of up to $450k when merchants circumvent this policy.
Now you know…….And knowing is half the battle.
