High-Risk payment gateway integration for Shopify stores simply means connecting a payment gateway that accepts high-risk merchant accounts to Shopify store. Since Shopify Payments is generally powered by Stripe, PayPal, or Adyen, in some cases, they may not support a few high-risk categories, and certain merchants may prefer to opt for compatible high-risk payment processors.
Let us understand why Shopify merchants may sometimes need this special integration. Merchants that operate in sectors such as nutraceuticals, supplement, hemp, CBD, adult products, firearms accessories, forex, trading signals, subscription or continuity models, or any other high-chargeback verticals, are generally declined by standard payment processors. Such merchants require special underwritings, and those solutions are generally offered by specialized payment processors. Such processors work with high-risk acquiring banks that have got experience in supporting similar merchants.
The integration methods that you may use to connect your high-risk payment gateway to your Shopify store.
The first option is to utilize the Shopify’s native third-party gateway support. Shopify allows external gateways, and this is done via its payments API. For this to work, the gateway that you choose must be listed in the Shopify’s approved providers list, or integrate via a supported method like external CRM.
The second option is utilizing a hosted payment page redirect. This way, the shopper is redirected to the gateway’s hosted payment page for checkout. Then, the shopper is returned to the Shopify page after the payment. This is not very smooth integration, but it is easier to deploy.
There are certain considerations, there are certain key considerations that merchants must be aware of. Shopify charges a small transaction fee if you don’t use Shopify payments you should factor this into your merchant cost projections. Then, the gateway that you use must support 3D Secure for all card-not-present transactions. This is to reduce the possibility of fraud transactions. The descriptor management also matters. There should not be any mismatch between the merchants identity and the bank descriptor, because this can cause chargebacks. Merchants that accept recurring billing or offer subscription services, they need a gateway with vault or tokenization feature.