Why won’t Stripe / PayPal / Square process my CBD orders, and what do you use instead?

The honest answer: Stripe, PayPal, and Square all classify CBD as a restricted business. Stripe’s prohibited-products list explicitly names “CBD, hemp-derived cannabinoid products, and any product sold as legal cannabis.” PayPal is the same. Square has a narrow CBD program that requires preapproval and rejects ~70% of applicants. Even if you sneak in, their automated classifier flags “hemp” on your product page or invoice and freezes the account 30-90 days later, with 90 days of held funds.

The actual high-risk stack we wire:

• NMI gateway with a high-risk MID via Easy Pay Direct, Square 1 Payments, or Tasker Payment Gateways. Underwriting is slower (2-6 weeks) and rates are higher (3.5-5.5% vs Stripe’s 2.9%) but the accounts don’t freeze.
• Authorize.net with high-risk underwriting through the same MID providers.
• Aeropay, ACH cash-network purpose-built for cannabis-adjacent. Customer links bank, pays via bank-debit, lower fees (~1.5%).
• Plaid ACH for instant bank-debit fallback.
• BitPay / NOWPayments for crypto resilience, ~3% of CBD revenue routes through crypto when an MID gets shut down mid-quarter.

Magento handles all of this through the standard payment-method abstraction. No core changes, just configure the right gateway modules.