Shopify payment gateways for CBD

How do Shopify payment gateways work for a CBD store?

Shopify runs its own payments product and also supports third-party payment gateways in the checkout. That second option is what makes the platform workable for a hemp or CBD store: the storefront stays on Shopify while payments run through a gateway and an acquirer that underwrote your category directly.

Shopify applies an additional transaction fee when you use a third-party gateway rather than its own. That figure is published on Shopify's own pricing pages and varies by plan, so read it there rather than taking any third party's word for the number, including ours.

Why the extra fee is usually the right trade

A known extra fraction of a percent is budgetable. A frozen checkout is not. The comparison people make is fee against fee, and the comparison that matters is fee against the cost of a week with no checkout, plus held funds, plus applying somewhere new under pressure.

Framed that way the arithmetic stops being close for any store whose category sits outside a platform's standard terms.

What to check before choosing a gateway

1. Does the acquirer behind the gateway underwrite your specific products? Gateway and acquirer are different parties and the acquirer decides. Name your formats precisely.
2. Is the Shopify integration supported and hosted in your checkout, rather than a redirect that costs conversions?
3. Does it handle what you need: recurring billing, refunds initiated from inside Shopify, partial captures for split shipments?
4. What are the full terms in writing: rate, reserve, term, exit?

The gateway requirements in general are on our CBD payment gateway page, and the account behind it on our CBD merchant account page.

What underwriting will want from a Shopify store

• Business formation documents and ownership
• Any state licence your products require
• Certificates of analysis showing products meet the 0.3% delta-9 THC threshold the 2018 Farm Bill uses to define hemp
• Your supplier chain
• Processing statements if you have history
• Your live storefront, read the way an underwriter reads it

That last one sinks more clean applications than anything else. Health claims on a product page will be found. If a description says a product treats, cures or prevents anything, fix it before you apply rather than after.

Switching gateway without breaking the store

Board the new route before you switch off the old one, then test a live transaction, a refund, and if you run subscriptions, a renewal, before moving all your traffic.

Subscriptions are where these changes go wrong. Migrating stored payment credentials is not always possible and customers may need to re-authorise, so plan that communication before the first failed renewal rather than after it.

The rule that outlasts any one platform

Read the provider's own current policy before you build on it, and re-read it periodically. Our policy source page links to each current document rather than quoting terms that will age.

And keep a second route available. A single payment rail is a single point of failure, and in this category that failure is not hypothetical.