Complaint / Review
EMerchants Group
Steven, Steven Allen, Steve Allen, Steven Hymowitz, West Coast Merchant Services, Chi Phan Misrepresentation of Fees and Charges

EMerchantsGroup is a Credit Card Processing Company operated by a man named "Steven" and his rep "Chi Phan" that works with Ecommerce companies to set them up with the ability to take credit cards for payment online.

They advertised that they were a group for merchants and would save me money on many things, but to get in I had to switch to them for credit card processing.

They have no phone number to talk directly and make you use a Hotmail address to communicate with "Steven", and when they contact you, a difficult understand lady named Chi will call you until you give in and swith to them (and pay $50!)

I was not unhappy with my processor, but Steven told me that this service did not charge more for what he called "Up Charges" (some credit cards get charged a higher rate by the bank and this is normal).

We changed to the service to find out that the UPS Savings he had talked about, AND health insurance was still not "ready" to go yet.

After three months of processing and not being able to understand charges that kept showing up on our statement that we could not match, we went to our banker that showed us that they were charging these upcharges a MONTH after they had happened.

We left a good relationship to get in bed with this jerk and now we can't get them to respond to our emails. If we cancel, they make us pay (the bank) a cancellation fee!

We thought it was funny when Steven would not write on the contract that we would not be charged these upcharges, but we were happy about the savings and signed anyway. (We were stupid. Never again)

Anyway - THis guy is all over the internet spewing this nonsense about "joining together" and "help the group grow", think he even has people schilling for him now.

So if you need to process credit cards for for your online store and see this group "eMerchantsGroup" somewhere don't be stupid like we were.

Deal with honest people. THis guy hangs out on the Yahoo Store Forums and Monster Commerce Forums. He has said some horrible things to some members who challenge his honesty.

We caled Visa about it, but they don't care.

Show that you care by passing this along to anyone you know that has an online store and tell them not to use this group.

They are BAD NEWS and LIARS.