Bank transfer checkouts are now available

While credit and debit cards have been the preferred online payment method for consumers, if you are a merchant, things may not be all rosy. Between high fees and difficulties to integrate with payment processors or acquiring banks deeming your business too risky – which should never call into question its legitimacy and viability – cryptocurrency payments are a welcome alternative allowing you to cut through a lot of red tape. However, these new payment alternatives are far from being as ubiquitous as credit and debit cards and it may still take a couple of years before they become part of our day-to-day lives.

Those issues are exacerbated for marketplace businesses, where payments are collected on behalf of other merchants onboarded on the marketplace, a business type that even "high-risk" payment processors seem to have trouble working with. Yet, those same payment processors do not seem to bat an eye taking under their wing businesses in the adult industry space. To complicate things, consider the case of a marketplace with both individual sellers and other businesses, with an average basket monetary value being all over the place, from the low 2 digit to 5 digits for bulk orders.

Card payments may seem instantaneous but behind the scenes, it is far from being the case: indeed, the buyer, merchant and acquiring bank acting as the middleman between the two are all relying on delicate lines of credit. When a purchase on the merchant's website is made by card, the card network (e.g. Visa or Mastercard) gives the order to the buyer's bank to debit his/her account and extends a credit to the acquiring bank, which in turn extends a credit to the merchant. Many things can go wrong before the funds actually settle, for instance the buyer may raise a chargeback or the goods may never be delivered, resulting in a refund. Pretty much any transaction in this tripartite relationship is subject to fees, which can exceed what the acquiring bank is collecting in a nominal scenario, hence the reluctance of overcautiousness of payment processors. Thankfully, direct bank transfers come to the rescue.

Direct bank transfers are already the predominant payment method in some countries such as the Netherlands, where iDEAL processes the majority of payments. It can't be denied that bank transfers are notoriously slow, taking up to 5 business days to settle funds, and are often subject to fees determined by both the sender and receiver banks. However, the impossibility of payment reversals or chargebacks, lower and lower fees for international payments, make bank tranfers an appealing alternative for merchants, at the cost of requiring more trust from buyers, a hurdle which can be a crossed by building trust over time and multiple repeated transactions.

TCG Ephemra Brokers merchants can now choose to let customers pay by a direct bank transfer, in USD, EUR or GBP, which they can configure from their seller profile. All the Ephemera Brokers [country] stores will also accept bank transfers in USD, EUR and GBP.

Due to the deferred settlement nature of bank transfers, there is a period during which there is no way to know whether the buyer's payment was sent. Instead of locking out the listing for which a payment via bank transfer is initiated by a buyer, or rather, should he/she claim to have done so, the listing will remain active and may still be purchased by other competing buyers. We made this choice to prevent people who are not actually interested in buying an item from locking it from other genuine buyers. When this happens and another buyer pays for the item(s) before your transfer arrives, a refund of your transfer minus any transfer fees will be sent back to you. You can contact us directly to secure your purchase by sending us a proof of the bank transfer.

As always, we are always working on improvements to the current features to offer a better experience for both buyers and merchants on TCG Ephemera Brokers.