Hi All,
Grumble grumble. It looks like I’m going to have to put up the prices of custom videos. Against my will- I set the prices according to what’s cost-effective for us to shoot. But I had reckoned without the stiff penalty than all vaguely adult-related business have to pay to process payments.
The only stable ways of accepting payments for the videos are by bank transfer (great, but not always possible; there can be some charges especially for international payments but generally it is reliable and low-cost) or by putting the finished video up on Elegance Studios shopping cart temporarily so you can pay and download that way. Which is fine, but we only get a 70% payout.
Which means that in order to actually get the 100 pounds or 200 dollars we’ve priced everything up at, we’ll need to charge 150 pounds or 300 dollars 🙁
Anyone who has already agreed a custom video with us- we’ll honour the price we quoted you, of course. If we have to accept payment via the shopping cart, we’ll take the hit.
But in order for shooting custom videos to be sustainable, we’re going to have to put the prices up to cover these charges.
What annoys me is that if we were selling custom made pincushions, there are any number of payment processing options we could use with very small commissions. We’re honest and upstanding producers, we’ve been in business more than a decade, pay our taxes, and have a large pool of generally satisfied customers and repeat purchasers. But our business is regarded as “high risk”.
I’m sorry we are going to have to increase the prices because of the stigma associated with being “adult”. It doesn’t seem fair.
Hywel
Greetings from New Jersey.
I don’t know if you’ve looked into this already, but what about PayPal as a possible alternative payment scheme? I don’t know what they might take as a processing percentage but I’ve used it for several purchases from other such “High Risk” businesses in Europe and it’s been fine from the buyer’s side of the process. Just a thought.
Cheers,
Jeff
Hi Jeff,
Actually the whole thing started with PayPal freezing Ariel’s account 🙁 So from the seller’s point of view, PayPal is not a possibility. Their terms and conditions forbid it, and they are prone to freeze or seize accounts at a moment’s notice. Getting the money back can take months if possible at all.
Cheers, Hywel.
Paypal has an official policy against that sort of thing, and gets nasty if it catches you trying to circumvent it.
I blame government action. The existence of “operation choke point” has only been revealed recently, but – as much as I’d like to blame it entirely on the Obama administration – I have to suspect that it, or something like it, has been secretly in place for a decade or more.
It isn’t just “adult” businesses either. There’s a whole laundry-list of “risky” businesses that are now risky for banks to deal with because doing so will draw negative bureaucratic attention. And I’m cynical enough to believe that this was deliberate, as a move to mute opposition: That people who object to porn businesses being targeted are perfectly happy to see (e.g.) those “evil and degenerate” gun dealers get hammered, and vice versa.
It’s a “first they came for the…” effect, only applied simultaneously, rather than in sequence. Or it could be looked at as government bureaucrats being war profiteers in the culture wars, increasing their institutional power by selling regulatory weapons to both sides.