Payment processing for adult streaming sites requires a high risk payment processor. The unique billing model for subscribers paired with payments for entertainers, make adult streaming a unique website type for most banks to support. Nonetheless, there are companies like Zen Payment who are dedicated to finding payment processing solutions for new or existing companies in the adult online entertainment space.
How Do Adult Streaming Sites Accept Credit Cards
Accepting credit cards for adult streaming sites is no easy task because of regulations in the banking industry. The companies that ultimately make the decision to give someone the ability to accept credit cards are banks, and each has their own rulebook on what they allow.
This means if you want to open a new adult website that takes payments from customers and sends funds to streamers then you need to find a banking entity that allows for that exact service.
- Search for Adult High Risk Merchant Accounts – A merchant account is your business bank account, and sorting by the ones that cater to adult sites will save you a lot of legwork when it comes to selecting one that’s best
- Do Not Choose Mainstream Providers – If you think going with a company that’s fast is going to solve your problems, you’ll soon find out it’s not so simple. PayPal approves accounts quickly and reviews them later. Once they find out you have an adult website, they will close your account. As a result any users who come to your site to checkout or are enrolled in subscription billing will get an error message. Payments can’t be processed if your account is shut down.
- Fill Out an Application – A high risk merchant account application is usually only a few clicks away and can be found after filling out a basic form fill on a website. Alternatively, customer service and sales agents are available during workdays and they shouldn’t leave you on hold so give them a call.
- Document Collection – Next, the payment processor will give you a call and send you an email to collect more documents. They’ll ask questions like:
- “Have you accepted payments in the past?”
- “What is your current chargeback rate?”
- “How many years have you been in business?”
- “Is your company owned and operated in the USA?”
Answer these questions and provide any other documents they request so they can put together a file for your adult streaming website.
- Underwriting and Review – After you submit all of your documents the high risk payment processor will submit them to the bank to review. After they take a look at all of your information they’ll either ask clarification questions or approve it.
- Install a Payment Gateway – Lastly, you’ll need the ecommerce technology that gathers data and transaction information during checkout – this is called a payment gateway. Every payment processor has a payment gateway so you don’t have to shop around for one. What you will need to do is download the integration to connect it to your website. This is usually short code that can be entered in your website by your developers, and the process is fairly straightforward.
OnlyFans Merchant Account Providers
OnlyFans’ merchant account has had issues over the years, but in the end they have found high risk merchant accounts to support their model. The problem they’ve encountered is on the payout end, because entertainers who make money also should receive a payment. As a result, some banks would require every single entertainer with a profile to create their own merchant account because they are the ones receiving a monetary exchange, and this is ridiculously impractical for adult streaming.
The good news is sites like OnlyFans come to companies like Zen Payments to get the custom adult merchant account they need to run a successful business.