In November of 2017 we were let go from our payment processor Stripe for violating their TOS selling “drug paraphernalia”. This happened a week before Black Friday and we were given two weeks to find another payment processor. After lots of research and even getting approval from a bank out of Africa to handle transactions and setup a merchant account for us. While it was the first offer, it was certainly not worth taking. They wanted a to hold a reserve bundled with high fees. Another candidate we found wanted to dictate what we can and can’t say about cannabis on social media platforms. Basically no mention or showing of cannabis.
We wound up taking PayPal for a few weeks to hold us over on finding the right Merchant Account, but we knew PayPal was only a short term solution at best. Shortly after the New Year we switched over to our new Merchant Account provided for us in the state of Maine. They’ve gone to bat for us when our credit union’s intermediary bank for international transfers flagged us as a plant handling company and temporarily suspended our ability to transfer funds to Canada. Luckily that situation was short term.
If you are handling and/or selling cannabis within compliance of your state law, CBD products, or have a cannabis related ancillary company being hassled by credit card companies, you need to look no further. Fill out the application and these folks will help you ASAP with your success in mind.
