Kratom.

You sell a legal botanical in Texas, you test your batches, you label honestly, and you card every customer who looks under thirty. Your regulars know exactly which strain they want and reorder like clockwork. But you operate in a category where the legal map is a patchwork — legal federally and in Texas, banned in a handful of states — so you geo-fence your shipping and keep receipts on everything. It’s a normal retail operation wearing a compliance vest.

The payments side is where it gets ugly. No mainstream processor lists kratom as acceptable, so sellers end up boarded under herbal-supplement or general-retail codes by someone who knew better. It processes fine until a risk analyst reads your product pages, and then the account dies — often with a hold on your recent deposits and no appeal. Some shops have burned through three processors in two years, each shutdown making the next application harder. The product never changed; the boarding was wrong every time.