Shopify Payments Wrongfully Blocked My Products

EddieFromHella
Tourist
8 0 2

Hello Shopify Community, 

I'm writing to ask for advice and see if any other companies have experience being blocked from using Shopify Payments because of the products category you sell. My company creates and sells cocktail mixers and bitters. These ingredients are most often used to make alcoholic beverages (cocktails) but are not themselves alcoholic beverages. I have plenty of regulatory compliance and paperwork to demonstrate this fact. However, unprompted, Shopify Risk Management recently flagged my products as "high-risk" because of their affiliation with cocktails and, subsequently, blocked my use of Shopify Payments. 

Since then, I have happily used Authorize.net as a 3rd party payment gateway. However, I'm beginning to feel the downstream effects of Shopify's command of their systems integrations. Today I'm attempting to install subscriptions and recurring payments into some of my products but (I believe) Shopify has recently blocked app developers from utilizing 3rd party payment gateways for recurring payments. I'm told that Shopify now requires the subscription apps to utilize Shopify Payments. Can anyone verify?

So therein lies the problem. I am open to suggestions on how to work around these opposing conditions: I must use Shopify Payments to offer subscriptions, AND I cannot use Shopify payments because they wrongfully think I'm selling alcohol. Here are a few workarounds that I'm contemplating. My hope is that the wealth of knowledge in this community can help identify other solutions and break through the gridlock.

  1. Reactivate Shopify Payments -- while I feel it's a longshot, perhaps I can reactivate Shopify Payments if I can bring my site up to some yet-to-be-determined code of compliance for alcohol products such as an Age Confirmation (a virtual bouncer). Better yet, how can I appeal the classification of my products as alcohol since they are not alcohol?
  2. Find an App that Supports 3rd Party Payments -- even after calling Shopify customer support, I have been unable to get a straight answer around new requirements for apps to use Shopify Payments. I'm holding out hope that there is an app out there that still integrates with Authorize.net. Shopify support's suggestion was to reach out to all subscription app developers with a template describing my conundrum.
  3. Create a New Sub-Website -- as a brute force solution, I could create a second Shopify site and install recurring payments there and interlink the two sites using navigation. This is my least favorite solution. 

All this being said, I wish Shopify had not wrongfully blocked my products from Shopify Payments in the first place. If there's any way to appeal the decision, I'd be grateful to learn about it. 

Kind regards,

Eddie

Co-Founder, Hella Cocktail Co.

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