I found an interesting porn site today and decided to pay their fee and I went through the hoops and put my American Express credit card number in, and it was rejected with a little note saying, “This site does not accept American Express credit cards.”
I went to a bunch of other sites and attempted to join them also (just for statistical research, you understand), and at each of them the card was rejected because they do not accept American Express cards.
How come?
I’m now waiting for Visa to come up with a commerical saying, “So if you want to join Naked Lesbian Bimbo’s Gone Wild with Horny Water Buffaloes don’t bother pulling out your American Express card, because they won’t accept it. Porn wants your Visa card.”
I don’t know the exact answer to your question. However, I do know that some porn sites do accept American Express. I remember one in particular that somehow lost privileges with Visa and Mastercard (that’s not a good sign) and would only take AmEX. That was several years ago though and things might have changes.
I do know that CC processing with AmEX is fundamentally different than with Visa and Mastercard. A site would have to specifically set up the ability to accept and process AmEX. Most users don’t use an AmEX exclusively so it may be seen as diminishing returns. AmEX also charges a higher fee to the merchant so they may reluctant to accept it for that reason.
OTOH, AmEX may have some crazy rule that I don’t know about.
I work for a company that does the majority of its business online and this is the exact reason why we do not accept American Express cards as a matter of course. However, our industry has notoriously slim profit margins however, which means that accepting Amex could conceivably cost us more than we make on each transaction. I wouldn’t have thought that true of porn…
Yes, but I see escort service ads with the AmEx logo in them. I guess the rich guy with a corporate account can solve his lonely nights with AmEx but the poor schlub who works for him can’t get a little release with AmEx. It’s class warfare I tell you!
How do I know? I saw it in the Yellow Pages, honest!
In other words - the online porn world’s habit of insisting on a monthly account that automatically renews unless the consumer requests it not to bit back.
