Snuff Store is once again able to accept payment via cards.

To find out who, why, and what happened to cause this glitch recently, please read on. Customers in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA, please read on as there is an important message below.

Unfortunately in February 2012 we had a ‘forced’ change of online payment processor; due to a change of policy by one of the two main card companies who’s image you will find on most people’s cards.

For some reason, snuff tobacco has (along with several other products unrelated to our hobby) been classified as a potential ‘high risk fraud product’. The fact that we as a company had very few ‘charge backs’ every year and fortunately did not suffer from fraud fell on deaf ears. This meant that to continue being able to accept online transactions, we have had to move to a ‘level 1′ anti-fraud merchant account - of course this means for you as a customer, online transactions with us are now probably the safest in our particular niche.

According to our enquiries, this change of policy will be hitting all small retailers of specialised tobacco products, not just snuff & could possibly be one of the reasons the very famous snuff shop in central  London had to recently close it’s doors.

We initially thought this process would take 4 - 6 weeks, but have completed it in 2. To say this process has been difficult and painful is a complete understatement…

There is a drawback however. Our new online processor has stipulated that we cannot use it to process payments from customers living in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA - don’t worry though, there is an an alternative below.

We will be working on an alternative card payment processor for customers in the countries we can’t currently accept online payment from. But in the meantime we can offer cheque or electronic bank transfer as an alternative. If anyone has any suggestions of a suitable and reputable company to use - we’d be pleased to here from you. Tobacco ’friendly’ banks and online processing companies are unfortunately very few and far between. We have several email suggesting PayPal. Unfortunately we cannot accept PayPal for payment for snuff - they banned snuff tobacco sales several years ago, but any other suggestions will be gratefully received.

*** Update 5th March 2012 *** 

Snuff Store can now accept cheques (or checks depending on your location!) in all currencies. Please however note, we need the cheque made payable to Zacoby Limited. It saves us time with the counter clerk checking our trading name credentials. So please make any cheques that you send us payable to Zacoby Limited. Please contact us prior to posting a cheque, so we can create an invoice and confirm and agree with you an exact amount in your currency. Of course, if you’d prefer to use GBP or electronic transfer as a means of payment for snuff that is ok too!

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To contact us, please use the contact us page on the main site / top right of this page. If you want to order snuff from us and you live in any of the countries that we cannot currently accept online payments from, please contact us and we will send you details of our bank / company payment name to put on the cheque etc to organise this. We will treat payments in this manner as if they have ‘cleared’, so we won’t hold up getting the snuff out to you.

Lastly, it seems somewhat ironic that we initially launched Snuff Store back in 2007, due to the lack of supply and variety of snuff in our local area, only to find that we ourselves could have been forced out of business - not from lack of support from customers, but from lack of support from banks… So much for small businesses driving the world economy out of global recession eh?

We do need your support. Snuff is a very low profit item and we have mounting bills to pay from suppliers and the like. Please continue to use Snuff Store and let’s hope we can continue for the foreseeable future without any further hiccups.

Kind Regards
Julia & Tim

http://www.snuffstore.co.uk
Snuff Store
‘Take A Pinch’

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