Craft CMS, Craft Commerce, and high-risk payment gateways –

Tasker Payment Gateways LLC helps website owners accept credit card payments online for regulated products. Below is a guide to high-risk payment processing using Craft CMS and Craft Commerce. Additionally, we cover other important topics including age verification and sales tax.

Craft CMS and Craft Commerce, its e-commerce platform, are great for pipe, bong, CBD, cigar, online alcohol, vape, tactical, and FFL websites looking for a WordPress alternative because, like WordPress, Craft CMS allows for the integration of a wide range of high-risk payment gateways.

Craft Commerce CMS process high risk payments – Tasker Payment Gateway quote image

This high-risk e-commerce blog often discusses specific e-commerce platforms like Wix and Shopify or focuses on plugins and e-commerce software like WooCommerce or Foxy. This time we’re looking at a complete Content Management System (Craft CMS) and its e-commerce plug-in Craft Commerce.

If you are not familiar with the term content management system (CMS), think of WordPress. Essentially Craft CMS is a WordPress competitor and Craft Commerce can be compared to WooCommerce.

When combined with the Craft Commerce plugin, Craft CMS gives you the freedom you need to create a beautiful, extremely functional e-commerce site – even if you sell high-risk products typically prohibited by most payment gateways, credit card processors, or merchant account providers.

Need help processing payments? Contact us for free friendly advice. A+ rated and BBB accredited, we make sure website owners get one-on-one assistance integrating their payment processing with Craft Commerce. Check out our About Us page to learn more about who we are and what we do.

Quick links to what's on this page: Hide table of contents

1 What your high-risk website gets with Craft CMS and Craft Commerce

1.1 Intelligent code for extremely fast sites

1.2 Content modules: repeatable design patterns

2 Hundreds of plugins to choose from

2.1 Craft Commerce age-verification solutions

2.2 Craft Commerce Tax calculators

3 High-risk payment gateway compatibility

3.1 High-risk Authorize.Net accounts for Craft CMS

3.2 Craft CMS also can work with NMI

4 Common high-risk e-commerce types that use Craft CMS

5 Need a high-risk payment gateway for Craft CMS?

What your high-risk website gets with Craft CMS and Craft Commerce

Let’s quickly run through some of the bigger benefits of using Craft CMS as a website builder for a regulated e-commerce store.

Intelligent code for extremely fast sites

The Craft CMS is very powerful and offers intelligent back-end code. This code is one of its strengths, as it makes for lightning-fast loading and easy integration of high-risk payment gateways and merchant accounts.

Compared to WordPress, many users feel that Craft is a more concise software product. Because WordPress is a product that’s been created and tinkered with since 2003, many consider WordPress’s code to be more clunky than what you’ll get from Craft CMS.

Having said that, if you’re not familiar with coding, CSS, and HTML, or you don’t have a web developer on hand you may find it more difficult to use Craft CMS as it is lesser-known and somewhat harder to find affordable support for.

Content modules: repeatable design patterns

You’ll get “content modules” out of the box with Craft. Content modules are configured sets of repeatable design patterns that can be placed on any landing page. All you need to do is “fill in the blanks” with your unique content.

If you’ve been using WordPress, you can think of it along the lines of the blocks you get with the Gutenberg editor. However, you’ll get much more freedom to edit the code and change the layout and functionality of these content modules.

Hundreds of plugins to choose from

Craft CMS offers a great variety of e-commerce plugins you can use to run your online store including customer analytics, marketing, and continuity solutions.

Craft Commerce age-verification solutions

This is one area where Craft CMS and Craft Commerce’s smaller footprint compared to other site builders and shopping carts shows. Craft CMS does not have a host of age verification solutions for vape, CBD, and alcohol like larger platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce do. There are some solutions though. The Cage plug-in by SkayoCrafts is available in the Craft Commerce/Craft CMS Plugin Store but only has a handful of installs and no recent updates.

AgeChecker.Net, which is the granddaddy of all ager-verification plug-ins does not offer direct support for Craft, but they do allow for API integration. We would recommend this method if you are open to a little coding (or have your web folks do it). We recommend you visit the Age-Checker integration page that discusses API integration.

Craft Commerce Tax calculators

Ensuring that sales tax is properly calculated for every product, state, county, city, and town is nearly impossible without a tested, reliable tax calculator built into your shopping cart. Luckily, Craft Commerce/ Craft CMS offers popular Tax plug-ins like TaxJar and TaxCloud in their plug-in store.

High-risk payment gateway compatibility

We got in touch with Craft CMS to see whether certain high-risk business types might be prohibited from using their services. They confirmed that Craft CMS is a self-hosted web application, which means there’s nothing on their end that restricts what legal business you can run with Craft.

This is great news for high-risk businesses, as Craft is also compatible with some of the best high-risk friendly payment gateways; NMI and Authorize.Net.

However, you need to make sure that your payment gateway is set up correctly for high-risk. Even if the payment gateway you use is high-risk friendly, the back-end merchant account needs to be approved for your exact products.

At Tasker Payment Gateways LLC, we’ve helped countless high-risk site owners set up their payment gateways for successful online credit card processing. We offer free, no-obligation advice, so please reach out any time with questions.

High-risk Authorize.Net accounts for Craft CMS

Craft CMS integrates right out of the box with the Authorize.Net payment gateway. But, this does not mean that the payment processing sold directly by Authorize.Net allows for high-risk payments. To process payments for regulated products like smoke shop items or tactical goods, you need a specialized high-risk Authorize.Net payment gateway. The process is very straightforward.

Please read our Authorize.Net for high-risk websites page to learn more about processing payments for regulated products using Authorize.Net.

We often recommend a properly set up high-risk Authorize.Net account for a variety of website types.. It is a great fit for e-commerce sites like online alcohol sales and deliveries, vaporizer and e-juice merchants, online FFL shops, CBD, pipe & glassware sites, and premium cigar membership sites.

Together with the content modules Craft CMS provides, you can create visually stunning high-risk e-commerce sites using Authorize.Net’s native Craft CMS integration and a high-risk merchant account,

Confused? We are happy to answer any high-risk payment processing questions you may have. Please contact us here for help.

Once you have a high-risk Authorize.Net merchant account in place, integrating a payment gateway with Craft CMS is very simple. Just go to your Craft CMS control panel, then go to Commerce, then Settings, then Payment Methods. At that point, you will enter your Authorize.Net credentials, test your gateway, take it out of test mode, then follow your first deposit right through to your bank account!

Craft CMS also can work with NMI

Craft CMS allows you to integrate the NMI payment gateway with ease through a simple plugin. Not only that, the plugin is free.

This is great news as it allows you to take full advantage of the many great and unique features NMI has to offer. But, the plug-in is not updated regularly and has very few active users.

We are happy to help you with a high-risk NMI payment gateway for Craft CMS, but in most cases, we feel Authorize.Net’s native integration makes it a better fit for most high-risk Craft CMS websites.

Common high-risk e-commerce types that use Craft CMS

As a result of making it easy to integrate both Authorize.Net and to a lesser extent, NMI, Craft CMS is a very good fit for a huge variety of high-risk businesses. Below are a few product types that our dedicated, independent agents can help Craft CMS website owners accept credit card payments for.

Need a high-risk payment gateway for Craft CMS?

Our dedicated, independent agents will recommend the right high-risk friendly payment gateway and merchant account based on your exact products and marketing methods. Our partners and industry experience will help you avoid sudden, closed down payment processing accounts or held money that can occur when website owners try to sell regulated items through standard payment gateways like PayPal or Stripe.