i'm getting SO tired of hackers

[mayalaen]

In the past three months, my online store has been “hacked” three times. Because of what they’re doing, it means I have to take down everything and rebuild a lot of stuff (for reasons I won’t go into because it would take way too long to type it out -- suffice to say SQL injectors and fun stuff).

I found a way around the major rebuilding, so that’s cool, but in the meantime I thought hey why don’t I just go with Shopify or some other place that takes care of a lot of stuff for you if you pay them a subscription fee?! Sounds great right?!

Except even when it’s completely legal to buy and sell skin care products, lidocaine, and CBD-based products (not even for ingestion, but just topical), Shopify and those other places shut you down. I read the terms and conditions before I ever signed up, and I didn’t see anything I thought applied to me. I’m not selling actual medical supplies. I’m not selling products you ingest. I’m not even selling things you need any sort of license for.

Basically they’re shutting everyone down not because it’s illegal.
Not because there’s a high risk involved.
But rather because the payment gateway they use DOESN’T LIKE IT.
They just don’t like perfectly legal substances even when it’s topical.

So after spending five days transferring hundreds of my products to Shopify, they sent me an email saying I violated terms, blah blah. After reading more about it, I realized that, if they wanted to, they could take issue with every single thing I sell because it could all be considered “pseudo pharmaceutical” and not allowed.

What it comes down to is that I can take the risk of going with them and just using third-party payment gateways (that I have to pay for and set up separately), I decided to just forget Shopify and stick with my own online store.

So I’m putting in a lot of new features. Before we only could accept PayPal online, but now we’ve got Apple Pay, Google Pay, Square/Credit and Debit, Amazon Pay, Venmo, etc.

I also signed us up with FedEx. We only had USPS and UPS before. I’m thinking about adding DHL, but I’m not sure yet.

I also got three new distributorships in the last couple weeks, so I need to put all those new products into our online store. That’s taking a while. Cool thing is, the ink company I mentioned on here the other day and got all excited over is REALLY good on social media and they already tagged and promoted us!

Since I signed up for Square, I thought I may as well put one of their readers in my shop. The company I currently use doesn’t accept things like Apple/Amazon/Google Pay, so with the new reader we can take pretty much any kind of payment our customers want.

I also put the Square app on all our phones, so we can take payment no matter where we are, whether we have the little reader or not.

It’s all SO MUCH WORK and last night I was so tired that I started to fall asleep while I was eating dinner. My mom poked at me and was like “I think you need to go to bed.”

I’m still working on it today, so I’m probably going to do the same thing tonight with the falling asleep while eating :P

Comments

[hit_the_books]

The payment gateway BS is something that has really started to bother me. Aside from the pharma end of things, it's heavily affecting people who want to be paid for making consensual adult content.

So many places won't accept payments for you if you're an adult content producer. And the whole thing with Patreon backing down on support for adult content creators is part of this.

But I am glad to hear that the approach you have taken looks like it's going to help you out in the long-term with the business C:

[mayalaen]

Exactly! It gets me really upset if I think about it too much. And you just know that there's people with money and power behind this deciding that they can control and enforce their morals on everyone else. It's sickening.

Patreon bugs me a lot. The whole reason Jack Conte came up with it is to give artists and "the little guy" a way to control their content and make money without big business sticking their grubby little hands in it. Him backing down on it pissed me off.

And thank you <3