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Merchants selling weapons like knives and collectible swords often have difficulty peddling them online, but Blue Payment Agency Inc. has launched a service to help do that while getting access to Shopify Inc.’s e-commerce platform.
Announced Tuesday, the service from Windham, Maine-based Blue Payment Agency enables knife-selling Shopify merchants to use an Authorize.net merchant account for these sales. The accounts are underwritten specifically for knives and other bladed weapons, Alex Roy, Blue Payment Agency president, says in a statement. The underwriting review incorporates the specific blades and knives products sold by the merchant, Blue Payment Agency says on its Web site.
Blue Payment Agency, which specializes in high-risk payment processing, says some other payment gateways decline to process credit and debit card transactions for online knife sales. Roy says his company’s Authorize.net accounts are tailored to these sales. This enables Blue Payment Agency to offer a direct integration with a “Shopify -integrated Authorize.Net merchant account, ensuring a stable and reliable payment-processing experience,” he says. In May, Blue Payment Agency added processing for knife and blade sellers to its product set.
Blue Payment Agency also provides payment processing services for firearms and works with several e-commerce and payments firms for this.
While processing for high-risk merchants can be profitable, it can come with additional fees and hurdles. The underwriting, too, can be more involved than with a regular merchant account. Typically, the high-risk classification is applied because the account is considered to be at higher risk of fraud, chargebacks, or returns, says Global Legal Law Firm, an Encinitas, Calif.-based firm specializing in the payments industry. The classification almost always means the merchant pays a higher processing fee than a non-high risk merchant.
