hi all, im pam and i just joined. i work on the payments and processing side. ill be honest, i mostly see operators as applications and risk files, and i realized i dont actually understand your side of it at all. what do you wish payment people understood about running an adult site that we consistently get wrong? genuinely here to learn, not to pitch anything.
welcome. the thing you get wrong most is the sudden reserve or freeze with no warning and a boilerplate email. we understand that a stable business can look risky on paper. but when you freeze funds with no human to talk to, you dont reduce your risk, you create a cashflow crisis that makes us more likely to fail, which is the outcome you were trying to avoid. a phone call goes a very long way.
what helena said about communication, double it. also understand that a chargeback on adult is very often friendly fraud, someone hiding a purchase from a partner, not real fraud. we get penalized as if we shipped nothing when the service was fully delivered. the dispute system assumes physical goods and punishes us for what is really a category mismatch.
Welcome pam, and genuinely good on you for asking instead of assuming. The big one for me is that you treat all high risk the same. A documented, compliant, long running operator gets the exact same twitchy treatment as a brand new sketchy account. Reward the ones who do it right with less friction and youd keep the good operators instead of pushing us toward crypto and workarounds.
nice to actually have a payments person listening. the thing i wish for is consistency. one month a transaction type is completely fine, the next month that same thing triggers a review and nobody tells us the rules changed. we can comply with almost any rule you set, but only if you tell us what it is and then dont move it silently on us.