Industries
High-risk & specialty retail
The category is not the problem. The underwriting file is.
What makes this sector different
Nutraceuticals, CBD, firearms, subscription billing, travel, debt relief — categories where an acquirer's decline is a policy setting rather than a judgment about your business. Merchants in these verticals typically overpay, sit behind punitive reserves, and carry single-acquirer risk that turns one policy change into a revenue outage.
How we approach it
- Underwriting file built to the acquirer's actual objections
- Reserve percentage and release schedule negotiated before signature
- Chargeback ratio monitoring with representment workflow
- Redundant acquiring so one decline does not stop settlement
Other industries
Questions
High-risk & specialty retail and card acceptance
What makes high-risk & specialty retail different from a generic merchant account?
Nutraceuticals, CBD, firearms, subscription billing, travel, debt relief — categories where an acquirer's decline is a policy setting rather than a judgment about your business. Merchants in these verticals typically overpay, sit behind punitive reserves, and carry single-acquirer risk that turns one policy change into a revenue outage. A generic rate sheet ignores all of that, which is why two businesses paying the same headline discount rate can have materially different effective rates.
How do you price high-risk & specialty retail?
Interchange-plus, so you can see the three components separately: interchange and assessments, which are fixed for every processor in the market, and our margin, which is the only negotiable part. Where a zero-cost program fits, we structure it as cash discount or surcharge depending on your state and your ticket size.
What does the statement review cover?
Your effective rate derived from three statements, the transactions that failed to qualify for the interchange category they should have hit, the monthly fee stack, and any equipment lease hiding behind the processing agreement. It costs nothing and we will tell you if you are already priced well.
Where are you based?
Chicago. The company and all of its software are lovingly created here, and we serve merchants across the United States from here rather than claiming local offices we do not have.
Tell us how your business actually runs.
A scoping conversation costs nothing and ends with a straight answer on whether a custom build is worth it — and what your card acceptance should cost.