Payment Processing for Precious Metals Dealers — When the Bar Ships, the Sale Must Be Final

The pain: a commodity margin colliding with a card-network fee

Every bullion dealer eventually does this arithmetic. A customer orders ten 1 oz gold coins. You quote against the spot benchmark plus a premium, and your gross margin on that order — after the premium you paid your supplier, freight, insurance and shrink — is somewhere between 1% and 3%.

Now the customer wants to pay by card.

At a high-risk card rate the interchange, scheme fees and acquirer markup on that single order land somewhere between 3% and 5%. The payment costs more than the trade earns. That is not a negotiating problem or a volume problem; it is a structural mismatch between how the rail prices risk and how the product prices margin. It's why the entire industry has converged on the same workaround: a cash-or-wire price and a separate, visibly higher card price, or simply "we don't take cards over $X."

The second problem is worse, because it doesn't show up on a statement. Metal is a bearer asset. A shipped tube of Maples or a 100 oz silver bar is fungible, instantly liquid, and untraceable to a specific order once it's out of your hands. It cannot be remotely disabled like software, cancelled like a subscription, or recovered in any practical sense like a piece of branded merchandise. When a card payment is reversed 100 days after delivery, you have not issued a refund. You have shipped inventory for free.

That's exactly why acquirers underwrite the category the way they do. Precious metals and coin dealers sit in the merchant category codes reserved for high-ticket, easily liquidated goods, alongside jewelry and gemstones. The underwriting model doesn't ask whether you're an honest 30-year-old family coin shop. It asks what happens if a portion of your order book turns out to be stolen-card fraud, and it prices for that.

The third problem is timing. A precious metals quote is a locked price against a moving market. The LBMA benchmark and the spot feed you price off don't wait for your customer's bank. So the actual sequence in most dealerships looks like this:

• You lock the price when the order is confirmed — often with a window measured in minutes, sometimes hours.
• You hedge or take the position from that moment, because you've sold metal at a fixed number.
• Then you wait. A domestic wire clears the same day if it's before cutoff, on a business day, and the customer's bank doesn't flag it. ACH takes days and stays reversible longer than that. A card authorizes instantly but stays disputable for months. An international wire takes 3–7 days, costs $15–$50, and can be recalled or held for compliance review.
• Meanwhile the market moves. If the customer's funds never arrive, you're unwinding a position at whatever the price is now — and if gold moved against you, that's a real loss on a sale that never happened.

You are running a business where the settlement time of every available payment rail is longer than the price lock the product requires. Everything else — the deposit policies, the "funds must clear before shipment" clause, the market-loss fee in your terms — is scar tissue built around that one gap.

What an unsolved payments problem costs a bullion dealer

Put numbers on it, because in this vertical the numbers are unusually stark.

Fees against margin. Take $2,000,000 of monthly volume at a 2% blended gross margin: $40,000 of gross profit. Move a quarter of that volume onto cards at 3.5% and you've spent $17,500 to collect $500,000 — against the $10,000 of margin those orders generated. You didn't reduce your profit on that slice. You inverted it. This is the same arithmetic that drives every other high-ticket vertical toward rails that don't price by percentage, but bullion feels it hardest because the margin is thin by design and public.

A single chargeback. One reversed $30,000 order at a 2% margin destroys the gross profit of roughly fifty comparable orders. Add the dispute fee — typically $15 to $100, non-refundable whether you win or lose — and the staff hours assembling a representment case you will most likely lose, because proof of delivery to the cardholder's address is not a defense against a cardholder who says they never authorized it.

The dispute ratio. Card networks run monitoring programs against your chargeback percentage; Visa publishes its dispute monitoring program thresholds openly. In a high-ticket category, a handful of fraudulent orders in a slow month can push a small dealer across the line. Remediation means fines, mandated fraud tooling and a review; staying across the line means termination.

The reserve. Dealers classified high-risk routinely have 5–10% of volume held for 90 to 180 days. At $2M a month with a 10% / 180-day reserve, roughly $1.2 million of your own capital sits in someone else's account — capital that, in this business specifically, is inventory. Every dollar in reserve is metal you didn't buy at a good basis.

Account termination. This is the one that ends dealerships. A category review, a de-risking sweep at the sponsoring bank, or a single bad month closes the merchant account on notice — reserve still held, order book live, customers already quoted. Bullion dealers have also spent the last decade losing plain banking relationships, not just card acceptance, because the category attracts compliance attention regardless of how clean the individual business is.

The customers you can't serve. The buyer in another country who wants a $40,000 order shipped and insured, and whose wire will take a week and may be rejected on arrival. The buyer whose card issuer declines the transaction outright because a five-figure charge to a coin dealer looks exactly like card fraud. Those orders don't appear in your loss reports at all — they just never close.

Why cards and bank wires fail precious metals dealers specifically

None of this is bad luck or a bad acquirer. It's the architecture.

A card payment is a reversible promise, not a payment. Authorization gives you a claim that can be undone for roughly 120 days. Someone has to carry that risk on every order, and it isn't the network — it's your acquirer, who prices it into the rate, the dispute fee and the reserve. For a merchant selling something recoverable, that's an insurance premium. For a merchant selling bearer metal, it's a premium on a loss with no salvage value, which is why the premium is so high.

Percentage pricing describes card risk, not payment cost. Interchange scales with ticket size because chargeback liability scales with ticket size. On-chain, moving $500 and moving $500,000 in USDC costs the same fraction of a cent, confirms in about two seconds on Base, and is final. There's no size-dependent liability left for anyone to price, so nothing justifies a percentage.

Clearing time is slower than the price lock. Wires run on banking hours, cutoff times and correspondent chains. Metals markets don't. A Friday-afternoon order paid by wire on Monday morning is a weekend of market exposure you didn't choose to take, and the deposit-and-market-loss clauses in your terms exist purely to push that exposure back onto the customer — which costs you sales.

ACH looks cheap and isn't. Low fee, multi-day settlement, and a consumer return window that extends well past the point where you've already shipped. For a dealer that's a chargeback with a different name.

Underwriting is category-level, not merchant-level. Your license, your inventory audits, your 30-year track record and your AML program don't move the model much. High-ticket, high-liquidity, remote-purchase goods score the way they score.

And you don't only collect — you pay. A serious dealer runs a buy-back desk, settles with other dealers, pays finders and brokers, and buys scrap from the public. Those outbound payments hit the same wall in reverse: cheques that clear slowly, wires that cost more than small lots are worth, and cash handling that carries its own risk and its own reporting.

How Payzum handles payment processing for precious metals dealers

Payzum is a non-custodial, crypto-only payment processor. Two design choices do most of the work for this vertical: payments are final when they confirm, and they confirm in seconds directly into a wallet you control.

Finality: the sale closes when the metal is still in your vault

An on-chain payment is irreversible once confirmed. There is no issuer, no 120-day representment window, and therefore no chargebacks — no dispute ratio to monitor, no monitoring program to be enrolled into, no dispute fees, and no rolling reserve. For a business shipping bearer assets, this isn't a cost saving. It's the removal of the single largest uninsurable risk on the balance sheet: the possibility that a completed sale is unwound after the goods are gone.

Speed: confirmation inside the price lock

Typical confirmation times are roughly 0.4 seconds on Solana and about 2 seconds on Base and Polygon. A customer who accepts your quote can be paid-in-full before the lock expires, on a Saturday, from another continent, with no cutoff time and no correspondent bank. The gap between "price locked" and "funds cleared" — the gap your entire deposit and market-loss policy exists to manage — closes to the length of a block.

Settlement: the money is already yours

Funds route straight to wallets your dealership controls. Payzum never holds, pools or custodies them — settlement is the payment. There is no Payzum balance, so there is nothing for a risk committee to freeze, nothing to hold in reserve, and no merchant account whose termination would stop your order book mid-quarter. Networks supported: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, BNB Chain and Avalanche.

Volatility: you're already long a commodity, you don't need two

Optional auto-conversion settles incoming crypto as USDC or USDT the moment it lands. You quote in dollars, you receive dollar-pegged value, and the only price exposure on your book stays the one you're actually in business to manage — the metal. If you want the detail on which dollar token to prefer and why, we've written about the practical differences between USDT and USDC for payments; the short version is stay coin-agnostic and let auto-convert normalize it.

The ways you actually collect

Payzum is drop-in — it runs beside your existing wire and card flow rather than replacing it:

• Invoices with expiration and overpayment detection. The natural fit for a spot-locked quote: the expiry is your price lock, enforced by the system instead of by an email chain. Overpayment detection matters more here than in most verticals, because five-figure orders get fat-fingered.
• Payment links and buttons. No-code, generated per order or per product line, sent by email or messenger — how most dealer-to-customer trades actually get closed.
• Hosted checkout (redirect, modal or inline) and a drop-in plugin for the online store you already run, so a stablecoin option sits next to your existing checkout.
• POS with a fresh QR per sale for the walk-in counter, physical terminals, PIN logins per cashier and per-cashier analytics. Any phone becomes a terminal — no acquirer, no card-network fees, no chargebacks on counter sales.
• Recurring subscriptions for accumulation programs — the customer who buys a fixed amount of silver every month, or pays a monthly storage fee on allocated holdings.

Payouts: the buy-back desk and the broker network

The other half of a dealership is outbound. Payzum does mass payouts: CSV batches for BTC, LTC and DOGE, plus EVM stablecoin payouts across Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, BNB Chain and Avalanche. One batch settles your scrap-gold sellers, your referral brokers, your affiliate partners and your dealer-to-dealer positions — in minutes, from your own wallet, without cheques in the post or wires that cost more than a small lot is worth.

Controls your compliance officer will ask about

2FA, encrypted secrets, and a complete audit log of every movement in and out. Signed webhooks notify your order-management or vault system the instant a payment confirms, so fulfilment releases automatically and nobody ships against an unconfirmed payment. A REST API with API keys and an integration playground covers whatever your storefront needs that hosted checkout doesn't. KYC is built into the product.

One honest note, because this is a category where overclaiming would be actively harmful: an on-chain payment is more auditable than cash, not less. Every transaction leaves a permanent, independently verifiable record with a timestamp and an amount. That is a useful property for a dealer subject to the anti-money-laundering program requirements that apply to dealers in precious metals, stones and jewels — in the United States, 31 CFR Part 1027, with analogous regimes elsewhere. It does not replace that program, and nothing here is legal advice.

How it works, step by step

Two flows — collection and payout — both configured from the dashboard. Most dealers have collection live within days, because there is no acquiring relationship to underwrite.

1. Connect the wallets you already control. One for sales, optionally a second for the buy-back and payout treasury if your controller prefers them separated. Payzum never holds keys — these are your wallets, on the chains you choose.
2. Turn on auto-convert and set your quoting rule. Enable auto-conversion to USDC or USDT so every payment lands dollar-pegged whatever the customer sent. Price against your spot feed exactly as you do now; the payment layer doesn't touch how you calculate a premium.
3. Issue the order as an invoice with an expiry that equals your price lock. Fifteen minutes, an hour, the rest of the trading day — whatever your risk desk allows. Overpayment detection flags an over-send instead of silently absorbing it. When the window closes unpaid, the quote is dead and you re-price, automatically.
4. Wire confirmation to fulfilment. Point signed webhooks at your order-management system so a confirmed payment releases the order to packing and insurance without a human deciding whether funds have "really" cleared. There is no "really" on this rail — confirmed is settled.
5. Take the counter with POS. Generate a fresh QR per sale, give each staff member a PIN login, and reconcile from per-cashier analytics at close. Walk-in customers pay from their own wallet; the sale is final before they leave the shop.
6. Run buy-backs and commissions as batches. Export the period's approved amounts, map wallet addresses, and send: CSV for BTC/LTC/DOGE, or EVM stablecoin payouts on six chains. Scrap sellers get paid the same day instead of waiting on a cheque.
7. Reconcile from the audit log. Every sale and every payout carries an on-chain reference plus a dashboard record — an easier conversation with an auditor than a processor statement and a reserve schedule.

Use cases for precious metals dealers

What this looks like in practice, for the kinds of dealers that book calls with us:

• An online bullion dealer running $2M a month on wires only. Card acceptance was dropped years ago because the fees exceeded margin, so every order waits on a wire and a portion of quotes die when the lock expires. They add a stablecoin invoice with a 30-minute expiry beside the wire instructions. Orders that used to take a day to fund now fund in seconds, the price-lock window becomes enforceable rather than aspirational, and the market-loss clause stops being the most-argued line in their terms.
• A local coin shop with a walk-in counter. Cash and debit for small tickets, wires for anything serious, and a persistent problem with customers who want to buy a $12,000 tube without carrying cash across town. The counter gets a POS QR generated fresh per sale and PIN logins for staff. Any phone is a terminal, there's no acquirer in the chain, and the sale is final before the customer walks out.
• A buy-back and scrap desk. The public brings in jewellery, sterling and coin lots all day; the shop pays by cheque or holds cash it would rather not hold. Payouts go out as stablecoin transfers to the seller's wallet on the spot, or in an end-of-day batch — with an on-chain record of each payment beside the intake ticket.
• A dealer selling internationally. Buyers in Latin America, the Gulf and Southeast Asia who want insured shipment and whose wires take a week, cost $40, and sometimes come back. A cross-border payment in USDC settles in seconds at the quoted number, no correspondent chain, no FX markup the customer didn't agree to. These are frequently the largest tickets in the book and the ones most often lost to friction.
• A vaulting and allocated-storage operator. Monthly storage fees billed as recurring subscriptions that don't die on an expired card, plus accumulation plans where a client buys a fixed dollar amount of metal every month. Because payments are final, a client cancels by cancelling — not by disputing six months of storage fees at once.
• A dealer that just lost its merchant account. Terminated after a category review, reserve held another 180 days, replacement underwriting quoted at six weeks. Non-custodial crypto collection goes live in days because there is nothing to underwrite — connect a wallet, publish a checkout, keep quoting. Afterwards the rail stays as redundancy that costs nothing to hold.

Payzum vs cards and wires for a bullion dealer — comparison

Common objections, answered

Isn't crypto far too volatile for a product priced against spot?

That objection is exactly right about crypto in general and exactly why auto-conversion exists. You quote in dollars, the customer pays in whatever they hold, and the funds land as USDC or USDT — dollar-pegged — the moment they arrive. Your book carries one commodity exposure, the metal, which is the exposure you're paid to manage. Nothing about accepting stablecoins asks you to hold a volatile asset, and dealers who want zero crypto exposure end the flow at the stablecoin.

Doesn't this create an AML problem for a regulated dealer?

It changes the shape of your monitoring, not the requirement. Dealers in precious metals, stones and jewels have anti-money-laundering program obligations in most major jurisdictions, and those obligations follow the business, not the payment method. What's genuinely different from cash — the payment method this industry has always handled most — is that an on-chain payment is permanently recorded, timestamped, independently verifiable and attributable to an address you can screen before you release goods. Many dealers find that easier to supervise than a counter full of banknotes. Build the program with your own compliance counsel; Payzum provides the audit log, KYC in product, and the record. It does not provide a legal opinion, and this article isn't one.

Do enough of our customers actually hold stablecoins?

You don't need all of them, and the overlap here is better than in almost any other vertical. The person buying physical gold as a hedge against currency debasement and counterparty risk is, demographically and philosophically, the same person who already holds digital dollars in self-custody for the same reasons. Add the international buyer whose local banking makes a five-figure wire painful, and the segment is significant. Every order that moves on-chain is an order with no dispute exposure, no reserve, and fees in cents — the economics work from the first month, which is why most dealers start with it as an additional option rather than a replacement.

How do refunds work if there are no chargebacks?

Deliberately, and by you. Finality means the buyer's bank can't reverse a payment unilaterally; it doesn't mean you can't refund. You send funds back from your wallet under your own policy — including your existing market-loss and restocking terms — with an on-chain record of both legs. The difference is that your refund policy is enforced by your dealership rather than retroactively by an issuer four months later.

We already take wires. Why add another rail?

Because wires solve the fee problem and not the timing problem, and they don't solve the international problem at all. Payzum is drop-in and runs alongside what you have. Most dealers start on one side — often the price-locked online order, where the gap between quote and cleared funds is costing measurable revenue — and add counter POS or buy-back payouts later.

What about settling to our bank account?

Payzum is crypto-only and does not settle to a fiat bank account. Funds arrive as crypto — optionally auto-converted to USDC or USDT — in wallets you control, and converting to local currency is a step you run yourself through whatever off-ramp your jurisdiction and banking relationships allow. That's a genuine trade-off, and it's the honest counterweight to everything above: part of what a card processor's percentage buys is the fiat leg and the custodial conversion that comes with it.