Credit Card Payments and Difficulty with Kratom

UPDATE: At least 4 banks now accept Kratom companies thanks to the American Kratom Association speaking to them and Visa/Mastercard! Thank you AKA! People often ask me why it's so difficult to take credit cards for Kratom. It's one of the biggest reasons that a customer will abandon a vendor and go somewhere else. Yet, it's the one thing that we have little to no control over! Why? Because Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover Card are all run by massive parent companies. In my research I discovered that the same company that owns the companies that own Visa AND Mastercard also own multiple Pharmaceutical companies. So it stands to reason the old saying "follow the money" is very clear to me that these companies are very anti-kratom! It affects their bottom line from opiate and other drug makers! That is why both Visa and Mastercard have announced that you cannot process payments for kratom on their networks. I do not know if the other two have officially said this or not. But talk about corruption!

So back to the issue at hand... Laughing Lion Herbs has had the same challenges as all the other companies... I'm talking about Happy Hippo Botanicals, Club 13, Golden Monk, Kat's Botanicals, Super Speciosa, Left Coast Kratom, Kraken Kratom, Kratom Spot, Top Extracts, Kratom Crazy, Krabot, Just Kratom, and so many more! (But buy the very highest quality Fair Trade Kratom from Laughing Lion Herbs!) We all have to play "games" to be able to accept your kratom payments. There are really only 2 options for us. We can create elaborate processes to "hide" our actual product sales from standard processors like what you'd use in any retail store in the US (Stripe, Square, PayPal, etc) and just wait for them to figure it out... which they always do. And then stand up the next one and the next etc. (I've personally had more than 40 different accounts with these companies) or you use a mesh system which is where the processor themselves disguises the products and spreads the charges out across multiple "MID"s (merchant accounts) trying to reduce the risk of being found out. There is a 3rd option but it's not ideal. Use an international bank and take payments that way. But then we get charged a minimum of 8% of each transaction plus tens or hundreds of thousands in reserve that we may or may not ever get back and then customers get charged an international transaction fee on top of that often times.

Until now, that's been the ONLY choices we've had for accepting credit cards. This has to stop! When a US citizen wants to purchase a LEGAL product, they should be able to do so with THEIR credit card! This is the corruption we in America have fallen into. If it doesn't help make their bottom line better, they will shut it down!

So what are we to do? Laughing Lion Herbs has learned of a cutting edge system that protects us from the common pitfalls of the other systems! We have no way of knowing if it will last but it's the best shot we have in the industry right now! We are the FIRST company using the BigCommerce platform to implement this solution!

And MORE exciting news coming down the pipeline too! Very soon we will be unveiling a permanent SAFE way to pay for kratom that cannot be shut down! It won't involve credit cards but you'll be able to purchase credits to buy kratom with a credit card and it will be untraceable! So look for that coming soon too!

All that to say that for myself, and all the other kratom companies out there doing things the right way... please don't leave us when we lose the ability to charge via credit card! It's not anything we can control and we can always help you by taking payments other ways (e-Check, ACH, Cryptocurrency, or pay by phone) consumers should learn to take the bumps in the road with their favorite vendors and realize that no matter who you go to, we've all lost processing abilities MANY times. It has nothing to do with the integrity of the business, instead, it's the greed of the top 1%.