Wetlook World Forum

Apart from PayPal's moralistic past if not present stance against use of their service for what they deem pornography or other "immoral" products/services, there is a bigger issue which all online retailers and all online payment providers have to deal with.

Online consumers/customers have to trust that the retailers will deliver the goods/services promised in exchange for their payment.

Online consumers/customers also have to trust that the entire system (including their own computer/browser, the retailer and its website, and the payment processor) has no weakness which would expose the consumer to fraudulent use of their credit card, etc.

The online retailer has to trust that the payment processor will deliver payment for products/services they have delivered to their customers.

The online retailer also has to trust that the customers won't turn around and dispute charges for products/services they have delivered to the customer in good faith.

The payment processor has to trust that the customers will pay on all charges they have incurred through their online purchases.

The payment processor also has to trust that the online retailer won't give the customer cause to dispute any charges for online transactions.

All this is a lot of one party trusting another. When an issue surfaces anywhere in all this, trust breaks down and it ultimately affects the whole process. We've seen examples of this in various situations:

Credit card processors routinely charging higher merchant fees for online retailers, especially when it comes to anything under the category of sex in order to offset the cost of chargebacks which are purportedly higher for such transactions.

Chargebacks for porn or sex-related products/services occuring subsequent to wives discovering items the husband purchased on the joint credit card.

PayPal closing accounts and seizing balances for businesses who had conducted legitimate online transactions in good faith, simply because the nature of the business did not measure up to PayPal's moral standard. If I recall correctly (please correct me if I'm wrong), PayPal's parent company eBay is run by Mormons who have conservative views on sex, except when it comes to the almost universal social convention of monogamy - something I find rather ironic.

Anyway... online retailers do try to provide their customers with what they believe to be the most universally accessible means of payment. After all, they do want your business. But, because they don't want to forfeit revenue they have rightfully earned, it's reasonable for them to be careful about the payment methods they actually choose.

As to the basic question about going beyond support for credit cards...

Let's face it - this all falls under the heading of "adult content", and any adult with the money to spend on such things should have no problem getting a credit card. Unless I've missed a critical detail somewhere, there really shouldn't be a need for a producer to support any form of payment other than credit card to access their entire target audience.