Alternatives to Stripe: Payment Solutions for Adult Sites & AI Chatbot Sites

Stripe has gained a lot of popularity in the market and it is somewhere around everyone’ s go to platform to fulfill payment requirements. 

But it is not suitable for everyone’s business, especially not an option for high-risk merchants.

What is Stripe?

Stripe is a full stack payment processing platform known for seamless, flexible and scalability. It is being used by many SaaS companies around the world to accept online payments. 

Stripe operates as PayFac and processor as well. For small business with low volume like Start-ups, it onboards the merchant under its own umbrella without requiring them to set-up a merchant account.

But in regions like the US, it routes transactions directly to acquirers like Wells Fargo bank.

Why is Stripe not for Adult or AI sites?

The answer to this question is very simple. Stripe has put both of these businesses under its prohibited list. 

Adult sites and AI Chatbot sites are considered high-risk because of its nature of business, which leads to high fraud, chargebacks. For big banks and processors like Stripe, it is also about the reputation - so reputation risk as well.

Some adult merchants think that just because Stripe lets OnlyFans process the payments, they can get lucky and onboard with them. However, for that to happen, you have to process millions to make Stripe consider you.

We see multiple AI sites are considering Stripe as their first processor to accept subscription payments. This is a very risky and foolish step. You can lose all your users valuable data like card tokens and subscription base in one second if Stripe strikes, which eventually happens if not sooner.

Then what are the alternatives to Stripe?

There are multiple processors in the payment industry that are capable of handling the Adult and AI chatbot sites transactions.

Stripe may have the easiest onboarding process because of its PayFac nature, but it comes with heavy cost if it strikes.

So, what are the alternatives?

It depends upon where your business is registered. In Europe, there are dozens of direct acquirers that consider the Adult and AI Sites. The reason for this is EU acquirers have the balance of both low risk and high risk merchants, which makes it easy to balance their threshold of not surpassing the chargeback and fraud percentage set by the VISA and MasterCard.

However, the US has limited banks that consider high-risk merchants. That’s why you see most of the adult sites that are incorporated in the states either use Segpay, CCBill or Epoch.

How PayConsults can help you?

At PayConsults, we work with acquirers around the world. With our 50+ global acquirers connection, we have onboarded multiple adult and AI chatbot sites in the US, EU and Asia as well. 

We work closely with merchants to evaluate their needs and help them set-up the website according to the Visa and Mastercard rules to increase the chances of approval.

The best part is we offer a direct merchant account, so you own the descriptor, which 90% of time eliminates the chances of confusion in the buyer’s bank statements that could lead to chargebacks.

PayConsults is an end to end consultant that not only helps you with onboarding new payment solutions, but also assists in optimizing risk and fraud strategy, reducing involuntary churn, and offering a seamless checkout experience to the users.

Connect today