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TLDR: PayPal banned me and I can’t find a replacement. I sell digital subscription bundles (adult/NSFW) and need recurring payments. In Iceland, Stripe isn’t available, local gateways don’t support subscriptions, Skrill and Bankful never replied. My business has been down for 3 months, and I’m running out of options.

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For a few years I had been selling subscriptions on my website with PayPal and a Wordpress subscription plugin, these were recurring subscriptions. The content I’m selling is a monthly digital art bundle and could be characterized as adult/NSFW. PayPal then suspends my account and I’m unable to create a new account. I live in Iceland and I’m having a very difficult time finding a new payment solution.

I’ve found local payment gateways here but they don’t work with any of the recurring subscriptions plugins, whether it’s Shopify or Woocommerce. The local payment gateways I found work if I’m just selling individual items, but not with recurring payments. Woocommerce has a payment system but not for Iceland. I’ve tried Skrill but to get the merchant option I had to delete my account and apply for a business account, it’s been two months and they never got back to me, I’ve messaged them constantly and the help center says I just need to wait. Stripe is not available in Iceland. I also applied for Bankful but I’ve received no response. I haven’t even disclosed to any of them exactly what kind of content I’m selling so it’s not like they are rejecting me, so I don’t understand why they don’t reach out, how are they in business?

Because of how strict everything is nowadays regarding online payments I’m limited to only using services available in Iceland, a tiny country that no one cares about, and if I find a solution then it needs to work with either Shopify recurring payments or Woocommerce recurring payments, but usually there’s always at least one that fails. I’ve now been unable to do my business for 3 months and it’s taking a financial toll. I’ve also realized that when it comes to opportunities to earn money online most of us on this earth are not sitting at the same table as the rest of you.

I’m not interested in crypto, I don’t know what options are available there, but personally I hate buying crypto and I’m sure that majority of my subscribers are not interested in that.

Can any of you give me advice about this?

Comments (5)

blasphemers · 1h ago

Payment Gateways don't actually process payments, they are built on top of payment processors and can only process payments if the underlying processor is willing to. You need to find a processor that supports your risk profile and they will generally have a white labeled gateway or integrations with gateways where you can bring your own merchant account.

figassis · 3h ago

When a vendor tells you to delete your account in order to create a compliant account, they really just want to offboard you without actually going through the steps. After you off board yourself they will quietly ignore you. Otherwise they’d just tell you to create a merchant account, separately from the personal one.

Idk if you’re technical, but your solution might be to build the subscription logic yourself. I haven’t touched WP with a 10 mile pole in years, but I know there are some plugins (I think even woocommerce?) that let you add support for other payment gateways. Then you can just use WCs built in subscription logic on the new gateway.

haute_cuisine · 2h ago

Can you use something like patreon / gumroad?

colesantiago · 3h ago

Whop?

sunscream89 · 5h ago

Find someone in a market relatable yet not identical to yours too big to have this problem and give them a cut.

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Comments (5)