Payment Processing for Alcohol Sales

Trends in alcohol sales have grown in recent years, with the market expanding in spirit fashions and vintage markets. Securing card processing for alcohol businesses, be it face to face sales via chip and pin or online stores is relatively straight forward. We’ve put together tips to ensure businesses selling alcoholic produce find the best merchant accounts available to them.

Unlike the sale of vape and CBD products, merchants selling alcohol aren’t deemed to be high risk. This means that the rates surrounding alcohol shops tend to be pretty competitive, which applies to both physical stores and online merchants. The acceptation to this are;

–         Merchants with high chargeback ratios

–        Merchants selling outside of the country of incorporation, for example wine merchants based in other parts of the world selling to the UK; for example Europe, North America and Australasia.

For online alcohol merchants ensuring that the sale is legal is paramount. This also applies when searching for a merchant account and payment gateway provider. 

Upon entering the site businesses must confirm that the purchaser is of legal age (both where the merchant is registered in and country of purchase). This is carried out by an age verification tick box.

Finding a payment gateway which is suitable for the sale of alcohol is simple, the hardest part is getting the merchant account approved first. Although the industry isn’t deemed ‘high risk’ by the majority of suppliers, it’s worth having security measures in place to prevent issues such as chargebacks occurring. Having a reliable payment gateway provider in place will ensure issues such as this are kept to a minimum.

There is no given method to ensuring you have a suitable merchant account or payment gateway for your alcohol business. However, it is worth considering not only the rates alone but the total costs involved with processing credit and debit cards.

This should be done on a pound for pound basis rather than a rate comparison. Using a broker can help unbiased comparison, at Merchant Advice Service we specialise in;

–          Wine wholesale
–          Vintage and collectors alcohol
–          Online Spirit Shops
–          Face to Face alcohol transactions
–          Events based venues

Any merchant working with large turnover might want to consider using multi merchant accounts, meaning that if ever there was a reason (such as high chargebacks) for the account to be deactivated there is a backup option in place.

This works by putting a proportion of sales through each account using the same gateway, the customer experience remains consistent in the event of termination of one of your chosen accounts.

Merchant Advice Service helps business owners who have been served notice by their existing provider find alternative payment solutions. Speak to our specialists today to find out more.