Cigars, WooCommerce, & payment gateways

We provide cigar-friendly payment gateways and merchant account solutions for WordPress WooCommerce merchants and have learned a lot about WooCommerce in the process. There are a lot of excellent site-building platforms and carts out there these days for the online cigar industry. It can be hard to make up your mind or change what you’re used to.

If you are just getting into the e-commerce or high-risk sector, it’s especially tricky because you might not know the first thing about what is best for your web store. If you’ve been selling online for a while and are looking to improve your performance, it can be daunting to research all the options you have – and stressful to make a final decision.

We can help you accept credit cards on your WooCommerce cigar site

Why WooCommerce works for online cigar sites

Ultimately you need to go with what will best serve your business, so we want to give you some basic information on WooCommerce. Woo is not only a popular WordPress plugin but also one of the, if not the, best open source carts on the market today. Our favorite WooCommerce feature is its compatibility with multiple high-risk e-commerce payment gateways. Woo makes our job of helping you accept credit cards easier and therefore makes your processing more stable.

NMI, Authorize.Net, and ePN are three of our preferred gateways for high-risk e-commerce like cigars & tobacco. These high-risk gateways function exceedingly well when correctly incorporated into your site (with properly set up, cigar-friendly processing.)

Another significant benefit of Woo is the already designed themes, some of which are specially tooled to help online tobacco sales. All you need to do is install the theme, plugin your information, and you’ll have a solid start towards attracting customers and making sales.

Online cigar flexibility on WooCommerce

As mentioned, one of the benefits of WooCommerce is the open-source access for coders and third-party plugin creators. WooCommerce’s extensive community of developers and experts do their best to anticipate the needs of their potential customers.

For example, a handy plugin for selling cigars online is the Product Stock Manager tool by Code Canyon which you can find and plug into your WordPress WooCommerce web-store. Cigar shop owners will tell you that many customers prefer to buy in small bundles. Cigar buyers want the option of 3, 5, or 10 packs of cigars at a decent price. Not only can this be a great deal for the customer, but also a great deal for the retailer, who can make a bit more per cigar than from an entire box.

The Variable Stock Management Tool plugin allows the customer to choose their variety in a drop-down tab instead of having to create an individual product for each pack. While this may not seem like a big deal, imagine wanting more functionality from a platform that isn’t open source. You either have to pay more, or you’re plain out of luck. Any reasonable idea for extra functionality can probably be built for your site with a good coder or the right plugin. This makes WordPress and WooCommerce incredibly powerful for any high-risk e-commerce retailer, especially cigar sellers, who often offer an extensive variety of cigars.

More information on selling cigars on WooCommerce

Taxes and the FDA

Another great function is the automatic tax applicator. One issue in e-commerce in general, but particularly with cigars and tobacco, is the various taxes from state to state. In some states, you don’t have to pay any tax at all for an online sale, even for cigars. Having an automatic plugin that applies the correct tax to each buyer is invaluable. WooCommerce comes with this sales tax feature by default, though you can enable the control manually if you wish.

Another issue you may have heard tobacco and vape markets struggle with is the new FDA regulations. Fortunately, the cigar industry is somewhat insulated from some new regs for the next few years, as the deadline for those regulatory decisions has been pushed back from this year (2018) to 2021.

Gutenberg and WooCommerce

Right now is an exciting time to be a WordPress user, as they are gearing up for three significant updates to improve the UX and other features of the open-source platform. These changes are significant enough that all plugin and widget developers will need to modify and upgrade their apps, so they are still compatible. WooCommerce is one of the plugins whose developers have been working hard to not only ensure compatibility but also improve performance and add functionality, which means things will just be getting better, something to consider when making your platform choice.

Merchant accounts and payment gateways for cigars

There are a lot of details and facets of the high-risk industry and one of the most important of those is your choice of payment gateway and merchant account.

Not only do we have extensive experience with payment gateways and WooCommerce, but we can also point you towards a merchant account that will fit your specific business and your site software.

Having the right merchant account is the difference between having a thriving business and having your account frozen or closed. Even a temporary shutdown can ruin a business. We will also hand hold you, step by step, through the process of incorporating your high-risk payment gateway into your WooCommerce site. We offer this at no cost or obligation to you; we are paid by the providers, not by site owners.

Tasker Payment Gateways wants to see your web store up and running correctly, so when you need to grow your business, you’re ready for it. Fill out the form below to get started.