Their statement in full:
[Important] To our customers using Visa and Mastercard
Thank you very much for your patronage of our services.
We regret to inform you that, as of 18:00 (JST) April 3rd, 2024, use of Visa and Mastercard will be temporarily suspended.
While this suspension is in place, please use an alternative transaction method or a different supported credit card brand, such as JCB or American Express.
We ask for your understanding of the circumstances and apologize for any inconvenience this may be.
In my opinion, this is really bad for anyone making adult content. DLSite is a Japanese-language shop for all kinds of lewd stuff like comics, anime, manga, and video games, and they've only recently branched out into English content with DLSite English. They are generally considered a pretty safe platform to sell your lewd stuff. I hope this is a temporary interruption of services because if it's not, that would be really fucking bad.
Your boy spent probably ~100 working hours at [previous job] trying to find a payment processor that was a-ok with porn and other "high risk" transactions. At the end of my search I found that there were basically 2 options: Sketchy service providers from deep Eastern Europe with payment processor fees ~3x industry standard or --and I hate writing this-- fucking crypto.
I really don't know what the resilient play is here. Folks like Patreon and Onlyfans are able to negotiate with payment processors because of their sheer size, but they clearly don't want to be porn sites and are vulnerable to BUT THE CHILDREN campaigns. On the other side of it, small sites can't fight back so SWers/horny people have to jump from site to site as Paypal whack-a-moles them one at a time.
Just so this post isn't MASSIVE BUMMER, here are some vague ideas to end it off
- There is a space here for a sex-positive Payment Processor whether that's a new one or through a concerted campaign to educate an existing one
- I guess you could crypto but fuck I really don't want that to be the option we go with.
- We develop some kind of model where we pay SWers and then (definitely unrelated) holepics show up in our inboxes out of nowhere
- UBI I guess? IDK I'm stretching to find any good vibes here here.