Firearms and some other verticals get treated pretty badly by many general vendors and service providers, and so there’s a weird niche of industry-specific alternatives for a lot of that. Some of this is due to unique regulatory or security requirements, but mostly it’s due to “moral” stances by various LPs in venture funds or other institutions (pension funds, etc.).
I would just use a normal bank, or Stripe, or something like that, to do payments processing for a gun store. Chargeback risk is actually lower than for anything else — you’re taking full identity information on every buyer, and there’s an entire agency of the federal government which would come down hard (with 10+ year and $250k fines) on criminals in the space. But, none of these vendors will permit it. It’s possible to get 1.5% card-present and 2% card not present processing in the space, but it requires jumping through some hoops, using local banks, etc. It’s like being back in the 1970s.
Online storefronts are similarly constrained. You can’t use the giants in the field (Square, Shopify, etc.) due to explicit bans in their terms of service. You’re stuck with $50-500/mo small business focused vendors, or rolling your own on more general platforms, and given that most gun stores are not run by technology professionals and are small businesses, this is a pretty big limitation.
Even point of sale and inventory software tends to be overpriced and specific to the industry. There are POS vendors who refuse to work with the firearms industry, others who tolerate it, and others who are integrated with the firearms industry ecommerce platforms but usually on a preferential or exclusive basis. It’s pretty obnoxious vs. selling almost anything else.
Similar to “this service becomes 10x more expensive if you say it’s for a wedding, vs. for a party”, everything in this industry seems to be markedly more crappy than for selling auto parts or pet food. There are regulatory and public/marketing pressure reasons why you have lots of local small business gun stores in the first place (otherwise, there would probably be either direct sales from manufacturers or from Amazon-scale distributors, or products sold again at general retailers like Costco or Walmart, but that would probably be overall better for consumers.
It’s annoying knowing I could probably build something better, myself, in 500+ hours of effort and 200+ hours/yr to maintain, but that’s not worth it for the $5k/yr it would save me (and maybe 20% better experience). My favorite gun shop in WA, run by a Microsoft product manager and competitive target shooter, actually did build their own software entirely from scratch, and it’s great, but…not something I want to do. So, I’ll be stuck with something mediocre, just trying to pick which of the mediocre options is sufficiently acceptable in the areas I care about.