Any business assumes certain risks, and e-commerce is not an exception. Moreover, the exposure to failures or different profit-lowering factors may vary for two companies of similar sizes and from one industry. Given this fact, who exactly needs a high-risk payment gateway and a high-risk merchant account?

​

The answer is a bank and a credit card processor. Acting as payment service providers to merchants, banks and card processors assess the risks associated with payment processing for a particular business client before offering them a merchant account. They evaluate various factors, from products a company sells and its sales volume to lousy credit card processing history, chargebacks, and fraud rates. That’s because payment processing is also a business, and its owners want to avoid unexpected losses and problems, or at least to charge more for providing services to potentially troublesome businesses. Moreover, payment providers are responsible for what they process, and they may face problems with issuing banks if fraud or chargebacks soar.

​

Each provider decides which factors to take into account when determining if the industry is high-risk. Hence, the list of industries falling under this category varies from one processing provider to another. Still, there are certain types of businesses that many payment services call high-risks:

 

• Airline and event tickets

• Dating and adult

• Auctions, credit collection, crypto, pawn shops

• Attorneys and brokers

• Gambling, betting, gaming

• Smoking-related products

• Health and wellness products

• Membership or subscription-based services

• Companies assisting in offshore business activities

• Real estate

• furniture retailers

 

Again, this isn’t an exhaustive list, and each provider has its criteria for identifying the merchants that belong to the high-risk industry. One PSP can deny your merchant account application, while others may approve your high-risk merchant account. In the next part, we’ll dig a bit deeper into the issue.

No Worries! If you don’t have any registered Business and required the High Risk Payment gateway for your Business.