Why are adult payment processors so expensive?
 

Why are adult payment processors so expensive? Zombaio that seems to be the cheapest one charges 10.9% - compare to PayPal that charges 3.9% + $0.30 USD per transaction. There are also alots of mainstream payment processors that only charges 1-2%.

high risk is its own category of credit card processing. paypal fees have nothing to do with anything.

Combo of:

1. We're an industry with a relatively very high number of chargebacks and a history of shady business, as much as some folks on here try to protest it is absolutely "high risk" far as transactions go, and...

2. We don't have any other options (partially as a result of #1, partially because of bullshit modern prudism) so they can get away with whatever.

If one's sales volume is high, a merchant account makes the most sense economically but that's not an option for everyone.

They are so expensive because they have to answer so many of your stupid questions. Hiring all of those Indians costs real money! :1orglaugh

Ok, ok.. I'm trolling again.

The above posts are correct. :winkwink:

High risk merchants are always more expensive than 'mainstream' merchants.
You can get your own high risk merchant account at much lower fees (5% or less), but then you have to take care of your own customer support, fraud management, affiliate payouts, programming (merchant integration, password management, etc.). All these things cost time and money (a lot more than people realize). So in many cases you are better off paying 10-15% for a full solution.

If your volume is high you can get MUCH better deals with CCBill, Epoch, etc.
A lot of the biggest sites/companies doing 100s of sales a day use third party billers.
There is a lot of work involved in running your own merchant accounts, and if you do a lot of volume you will need programmers, accounting staff, fraud control, customer support staff, etc. So even then it's sometimes cheaper/easier to just use a third party biller.

You could get your own merchant account and use companies like Netbilling, but they charge fees as well. It's usually cheaper than using Epoch/CCBill though.