There has been a rise in the use of CBD products recently. CBD products are now available in various forms, such as oils, edibles, and topicals. However, there is still much unknown about CBD and its effects. Therefore, Square CBD offers early access to CBD products to allow businesses to sell them before they are fully approved. This will help businesses get a head start on the competition and allow them to offer new and innovative products to their customers.
Some of the products that are allowed in Square’s early access CBD program include CBD oils, edibles, topicals, and tinctures. These products must be derived from hemp and contain less than 0.3% THC. Businesses must also have a valid license to sell CBD products in their state.
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Can You Accept CBD Payments With Square?
Yes, businesses can accept CBD payments through Square. However, there are some restrictions that businesses need to be aware of:
- All CBD products must be derived from hemp and contain less than 0.3% THC.
- Businesses must have a valid license to sell CBD products in their state.
- Businesses will only be able to sell CBD products through Square if they are part of the early access program.
The Evolution of Square Early Access CBD
Over the years, Square has completely relinquished control of CBD companies to Square. Later, hemp and derivatives were federally legalized under President Trump’s farm bill, but most financial institutions have stayed wary of partnering with cannabis selling companies. But this concern is fast fading, especially after the House of Representatives passed a bill to protect banks from being penalized by federal regulators for working with state-legal marijuana businesses.
Down the line, the announcement of WooCommerce’s partnership with Square Payment Solutions led to an expansion of services for business people trading in CBD products online. This was small-step progress towards facilitating the selling of CBD products online. However, many restrictions still exist. Merchants are still faced with pitfalls that they must overcome!
In December 2018, CBD (a cannabidiol product) was excluded from the U.S. federal list of controlled substances.
The CBD product (and hundreds of other cannabidiols) is identified as lacking the psychoactive effect of THC. In addition, the “Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018” passed new laws loosening earlier restrictions and giving new regulated paths to merchants and farmers for trading CBD-based products.
How to Access CBD
You can access CBD in a legal gray area in a few U.S. jurisdictions. However, check your state and local laws to see whether they approve the selling and purchasing of CBD and substances of the equivalence (for instance, alcohol sales are banned in jurisdictions like Alabama).
Therefore, as a business person, you must understand various legal issues even though the product may be legal at the federal level. Always lean back and refer to your local laws.
Internal Policies
Specific internal policies may also forbid the selling of CBD and listed products altogether. Or you may not find a shipping company, web host, bank, or payment processor that at least issues guidelines for trading on these products. The partnership between Square and WooCommerce may at least solve the payment processor hurdle for business owners. The General Manager of WooCommerce, Paul Maiorana, distinctly acknowledged that WooCommerce aims to offer CBD merchants an efficient and secure service so they can focus more on improving consumer lives. Square gives merchants access to other automatic services like WooCommerce shipping for label printing, Jetpack for malware scanning, WooCommerce Tax for tax calculation at checkout, etc.
Restrictions On Connected Stores
Automattic hosts the WooCommerce software through wordpress.com, and WooCommerce forbids the trading of CDB products. As a result, business owners supposedly use the WooCommerce plugin (the WordPress.org version) and operate under a third-party host that doesn’t restrict the selling of CBD products.
You may also face restrictions while attempting to connect to Automattic’s services if you are a self-hosted store operating under WooCommerce. This raised havoc back in 2019 when several self-hosted merchants were not allowed to connect to wordpress.com via Jetpack if they traded CBD products. These guidelines have since been updated and clarified, depicting the dos and don’ts of Automattic’s services. Until this day, the policies are hardly unchanged. Of course, the partnership with Square allows the regulations to be relaxed to a level.