How to Accept Credit Cards on Your Online Gun Store (Shopify, WooCommerce & BigCommerce)

Selling firearms online is legal, licensed and heavily regulated. So why is taking a credit card for it so hard? It's not the law. It's the payment company's own rules.

The easiest payment options, the ones that approve you in minutes, are payment facilitators. Shopify Payments, Stripe, Square and PayPal all work the same way: they place thousands of small businesses under one big master account and write their own list of things you can't sell on it. Firearms, ammunition and often accessories are on every one of those lists.

Policies change. Always read a provider's current acceptable-use terms before you sign up.

Many dealers sign up anyway, because the approval is instant and nobody checks at first. That's the trap. When the platform eventually notices what you sell, the account is closed for a "policy violation," often with no appeal, and the money already in the account can be held for 90 days or more while payroll and inventory bills keep coming.

The fix isn't a better website or a different product description. It's a different type of payment account, one where the bank knows you sell firearms before it approves you.

When a customer clicks "Pay" on your website, three separate pieces work together. All-in-one platforms hide this by bundling them. For a gun store, you'll put them together yourself, and it's simpler than it sounds.

The piece that matters most for a gun store is #3, the merchant account. A dedicated merchant account is approved for your business specifically, after a human underwriter reviews your FFL, your products and your website. Because the bank approved you as a firearms business from the start, there's nothing to "discover" later.

The gateway (#2) is the piece people get confused about. Authorize.Net is one of the oldest and most widely supported gateways, and it connects to more than 1,000 shopping carts. It doesn't decide what you're allowed to sell. Your merchant account does.

All three major platforms can take payments for a firearm business through a third-party gateway. They differ in fees, control and how much they care what you sell.

Shopify: the "bring your own processor" route

Plenty of firearm and ammunition retailers run on Shopify. The key is that Shopify lets you use an outside payment provider when you can't use Shopify Payments. Authorize.Net is one of the supported providers. Three things to know before you commit:

• The third-party fee. Shopify adds a fee on orders paid through an outside provider: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, 0.2% on Plus. Firearm stores can't avoid it by switching to Shopify Payments, so include it in your math. At higher volume, a bigger Shopify plan can cost less overall.
• Shopify's own product rules still apply. Your payment provider approving you doesn't override Shopify's terms for the store itself. Some product types may need Shopify's approval, and the Shop app sales channel doesn't allow weapons at all.
• Subscriptions need an extra app. Shopify's current Authorize.Net app doesn't support Authorize.Net's recurring billing or stored customer profiles. If you sell memberships or subscription boxes, plan for a separate subscription app.

WooCommerce: full control, no platform fee

WooCommerce runs on your own WordPress hosting, so no platform company sets product rules for your store. That makes it a popular choice for FFL dealers. You add payments with an Authorize.Net plugin and pay no extra platform fee. The trade-off: you're responsible for hosting, security updates and plugin maintenance, or for paying a developer to handle them.

BigCommerce and firearm-specific platforms

BigCommerce includes Authorize.Net as a built-in payment option and charges no extra fee for using it. Several large firearm manufacturers and retailers run on it. There are also firearm-specific ecommerce platforms built around FFL transfers and distributor inventory feeds. Many of them support Authorize.Net too, so ask before you sign.

Here's the whole process from "Shopify Payments said no" to your first approved order.

1. 1

   Apply for a firearm-approved merchant account

   Tell the provider up front that you sell firearms, ammunition or accessories online. Hiding it is how accounts get closed later. Have your FFL, ID, a voided check and recent bank statements ready.

2. 2

   Get your Authorize.Net gateway

   Once you're approved, your provider sets up the Authorize.Net account linked to your merchant account and sends your login.

3. 3

   Get your credentials from Authorize.Net

   In the Authorize.Net Merchant Interface, find your API Login ID and generate a Transaction Key. Treat these like passwords.

4. 4

   Connect it in Shopify

   In your Shopify admin go to Settings → Payments, add Authorize.Net as a payment provider, and enter your credentials. Shopify's help center has the current screens.

5. 5

   Run a test order, then go live

   Place a small real order and refund it. Confirm it shows in both Shopify and Authorize.Net, and that your fraud settings (below) are switched on.

On WooCommerce or BigCommerce the steps are the same. Only step 4 changes: install the Authorize.Net plugin (WooCommerce) or enable Authorize.Net under your payment settings (BigCommerce).

Underwriters review your website before they approve an online merchant account. A site that's missing the basics is one of the most common reasons approvals stall. Make sure yours has:

• ✓Refund and return policy, including how returns work for firearms transferred through an FFL
• ✓Shipping policy that explains firearms ship only to a licensed FFL for transfer
• ✓Age requirements stated clearly, with age confirmation at checkout
• ✓Contact details: business name, phone number, email and physical address
• ✓Privacy policy and terms of sale, including state restrictions on what you can ship where
• ✓Secure checkout (HTTPS) and accurate product descriptions and prices

For the full list, see what your website needs to accept credit cards and our ecommerce website checklist.

Selling online adds a few payment-specific rules on top of the federal and state firearms laws you already follow. None of them are hard, but they need to be built into your checkout.

Firearms ship to an FFL, not to the buyer

Your customer pays online, but the firearm ships to a licensed dealer near them for the background check and transfer. Your checkout should collect the receiving FFL's information, and your policies should explain the process. This also cuts fraud: a stolen card is much less useful when the item must be picked up in person with ID.

Age limits on ammunition and firearms

Under federal law, licensed dealers can't sell handguns or handgun ammunition to anyone under 21, or long guns and their ammunition to anyone under 18. Some states go further. California and New York, for example, require background checks for ammunition purchases. Show age requirements on product pages, confirm age at checkout, and block shipping to states or addresses where an item can't legally go.

The firearms merchant code

Card networks use a merchant category code (MCC) to label what kind of business you are. A firearms-specific code, MCC 5723, is required for firearm retailers in California, Colorado and New York, and banned in about 20 other states. Your processor, not you, assigns the code, but you want one who knows which rule applies where you're located.

This article is general payments guidance, not legal advice. Firearms laws vary by state and change often. Confirm your obligations with an attorney or your state's regulators.

Online orders are "card-not-present," so they carry more fraud risk than a card swiped at your counter. Chargebacks, where a customer disputes a charge with their bank, are what put online merchant accounts at risk. In April 2026 Visa lowered its "excessive" threshold to 1.5% of online and phone orders (fraud reports plus disputes, once you reach 1,500 in a month). See our chargeback guide. Keep well under that with a few habits:

• Turn on AVS and CVV checks, which match the billing address and the security code on the card.
• Use Authorize.Net's Advanced Fraud Detection Suite to flag or hold orders by amount, velocity, location and IP address. See our guide to fraud prevention tools.
• Watch the red flags: rush shipping to a different address, several cards tried on one order, mismatched names. Read 12 signs of card-not-present fraud.
• Use a recognizable billing descriptor so customers recognize your store's name on their statement and don't dispute a charge they forgot about.
• Answer customers fast. Most "friendly fraud" chargebacks start as an unanswered email about shipping status.

• eCheck / ACH for large orders. For high-ticket firearms, bulk ammunition or wholesale orders, bank-to-bank payments cost less than cards. Authorize.Net can add eCheck alongside cards on the same checkout.
• Financing. Buy-now-pay-later and firearm financing apps are separate lenders you add to your checkout. They run alongside your merchant account, not instead of it.
• Deposits and layaway. Take a deposit by card and the balance later, with the terms in writing. This is especially important for special orders and NFA items (see taking payments for NFA items).

Also selling on GunBroker or running a counter POS? See which POS and marketplace setups work with your processor.

Your total cost has three parts. Knowing them makes it easy to compare offers:

• Processing rate: a percentage plus a few cents per transaction. With interchange-plus pricing you see the card networks' actual cost and your provider's markup as separate lines, which is the easiest way to know you're paying a fair rate.
• Gateway fee: a monthly fee for Authorize.Net, sometimes with a small per-transaction fee.
• Platform fee: only on Shopify, the 0.2%–2% third-party transaction fee above.

Watch for the costs that don't appear in the headline rate: early termination fees, annual fees, PCI "non-compliance" fees and long equipment leases. Also ask whether a reserve (a percentage of sales held back for a period) will apply, and get the answer in writing before you sign.