ePassporte and StormPay: PayPal's Replacements?

Webmasters in the online adult industry received a huge kick in the face a couple of months ago when PayPal announced that they would no longer accept payments from adult transactions. This decision by PayPal caused quite a stir and had Webmasters wondering how much revenue they were going to lose because of it. PayPal, when it actually accepted adult transactions, was such an easy service to use to send and receive payments, and worked especially well in this particular industry where people either do not have credit cards or they are scared to use them. PayPal was also a recognized name and a good percentage of porn surfers actually had PayPal accounts. It was truly a great all round payment solution for adult paysites. 

High Risk Merchant Providers

With the result of payment processors like paypal cutting off adult merchants, other credit card processors that cater to the adult industry have been popping up. Merchant service providers with certain willing banks can and will underwrite adult merchants including adult websites, adult bars and night clubs, xxx cam providers, escort services and sex toy adult toy merchant sellers. A small sample of adult friendly merchant credit card processors include companies like:

• High Risk Guys
• Entrust Bankcard
• MerchantAccounts.co
• HighRiskCharge

Once Webmasters received word that they were no longer going to be able to accept PayPal transactions, they scrambled to find alternative solutions. It seemed there was really no service out there that could match PayPal in terms of functionality and recognition, but there were a couple of companies that could provide a similar type of payment solution. ePassporte and StormPay are now the two big rivals that are going head to head to try to gain the business of adult webmasters that were jilted by PayPal. Both companies offer similar solutions, but with a few key differences. I will try and outline in this article what exactly each of these companies is offering and do a comparison of the two. 

ePassporte actually provides a few different products and/or services. It is a Visa card, a Plus ATM Card, and it is a Virtual Visa, which is something similar to PayPal. The ePassporte Virtual Visa may be loaded from an existing credit card. Once the ePassporte account is loaded with a stored value, the ePassporte Virtual Visa is created instantly, online and ready to use for purchases. So, it is very similar to PayPal except that the money can only be loaded from credit cards and not banks. ePassporte also offers the Visa Electron Card which can basically be used as a debit card at most all ATM machines and point of sale terminals that require a pin number. ePassporte customers can transfer funds from their Virtual account to their Visa Electron Card.

Benefits of ePassporte:

• Backed by a processing giant named Visa.
• Ability to process transactions for people who live in countries that may be blocked by other companies.
• They are anonymous, which means that when your credit card statement comes you will only see ePassporte instead of something like hornychicks.com
• Ability to process transactions for individuals who would be considered high-risk by other companies.

Disadvantages of ePassporte:

• You must have a minimum of $50 in your account to make a purchase. For instance, if someone wanted to buy something for $15 they would have to first put $50 in their account.
• It only supports non-recurring payments.
• It is rumored that their customer service is not the greatest.
• You need to have a credit card to use the service, you cannot transfer funds from your bank account.
• It requires CVV2 authorization and some banks do not support this, especially in Europe .

StormPays system is pretty similar to PayPal and ePassporte. The account can be used to send or receive funds for online purchases, etc. After funding their account, the customer has the ability to send funds to any recipient with an email address, even if they do not have a StormPay account. Customers have the ability to transfer funds into their StormPay accounts via credit card, online check, 900 Pay, Money Order, or by visiting one of their walk-In funding locations. StormPay also allows you to transfer funds to a special debit card that can be used in ATM machines across the globe, or even to your own bank account.
Benefits of StormPay:

• Support for subscriptions (recurring billing).
• Funds can be transferred from your StormPay account to your bank account.
• Funds can be deposited directly from your checking account.
• Members accepted from any country in the world.
• Several options to choose from to fund your account.
• Their authorization process is not as intense or as time consuming as ePassporte’s process is.
• Your account will never be frozen for participating in any kind of MLM program.
• If you do use them and you actively promote their service through their referral program, you could possibly make yourself some money.

Disadvantages of StormPay:

• You cannot transfer funds to international bank accounts.

Like I stated earlier, both of these companies provide viable solutions, but they cannot yet provide everything that PayPal could. There are pros and cons to transferring your business to either one of these companies, but I hope that I have noted their differences here so that webmasters can make educated decisions when trying to choose between the two.