Adult Payment Processors & Gateways - Impossible For Newcomers?
 

For anyone new to the industry with just a modest amount of users wanting paid memberships and subscriptions, it seems almost impossible to create a profitable site because of the restrictions by payment gateways.

I understand adult is generally deemed as high risk, but as far as I can tell, the only two realistic options I'm left with are:

- Authorize.net (which seems complicated by opening multiple merchant accounts on your behalf - I'm still not 100% sure they actually allow adult sales)
- CCBill (high fees, outdated)

Both of which seem very poorly equipped for someone UK-based such as myself.

I find it surprising that adult payments are so far behind, when conversely payments for other services are so simple to integrate with Stripe, Paypal etc.

Are there any better alternatives I'm missing (for a small/newish site without huge revenue initially)? Or are either of the above actually a lot better than what I've read about them so far?

Any help and advice is hugely appreciated.

To be taken seriously you have no real alternatives then the Epochs,Verotels or CCbills of this World. And yes, you need to initially pay for the priviledge

paysitecash is a good alternative

Back when PayPal first started you could only connect your bank account to your PayPal account, and transfer money between PayPal accounts (which was a bank-to-bank transaction essentially). A lot of adult content providers seemed to use PayPal until PayPal started taking Credit Card payments...then the CC industry forced their moral restrictions on PayPal and adult was pulled from permitted genres.

And the CC companies have just continued to increase the restrictions. So many sites have had to close entire sections (even adult social networks like Fetlife) because they fear not being able to take ad revenue.

I get why PayPal caved...they were trying to be the "pay for everything" service, so they had to fall in line in order to get in bed with credit cards.

But since bank-to-bank transactions don't have the same moral restrictions as credit car d ones, why can't we recreate what PayPal originally was in the 90's? Create a service (with an awesome interface like Stripe) that only allows bank-to-bank transactions? Market it for adult only. Huge sites like C4S and FetLife would jump all over that because then they could offer/discuss topics that the CC companies would terminate your merchant account over.

You could even make it more secure and less prone to fraud like Credit Card with things like requiring two-factor authentication to authorize payments, etc.

I've asked a few people (a VC, someone who works in the back end of a clearing house) but I've yet to find anyone who knows how you could even start to set something like that up. I'm a developer and confident that a small team could easily build this service, but we'd need someone with intimate knowledge of financial transactions (and probably a lawyer) to help us figure things out.

Twispay seems like an effective solution for adult payment processing