NEVER NEVER NEVER do business with iPayment Inc. You may have a sales rep that works for another company (such as Merchant Lynx Services, an ISO of iPayment) approach you with an iPayment application. DO NOT SIGN IT!
Run do not walk away!!!
They charged me a PCI-DSS compliance fee of $129.. Although I only process a few hundred dollars of TOTAL processing per month. The customer service agent said the fee was mandated by VISA/Mastercard. It is NOT! A baltant lie! It is another fee that they charge to pad their revenues.
I process through a very well known gateway that offers 128 bit SSI encryption and is fully PCI-DSS compliant by the issuing card companies (Visa/Mastercard). I pay a fee for this integrated secure service and there is no need whatsoever to pay another fee to iPayment. Again they claim it is mandatory by Visa/Mastercard. Visa/Mastercard only want merchants to be aware of compliance issues and to take steps to safeguard customers sensitive information. If a merchant is NOT compliant - Visa/Mastercard will fine the merchant heavily, but they will NOT impose monthly or annual fees. You, as a merchant, can get the guidleines from Visa's and Mastercard's web-site and follow each to the letter. Again... Visa/Mastercard do NOT require a fee from the merchant. They enforce compliance by fines not monthly fees. This is the greedy processing companies trying to "fee you" to death.
If you process credit cards through an ISO of iPayment or with iPayment directly. Call the customer service line 800-324-9825 option 2 and demand they credit back the PCI fees they drafted from your bank account.
It's time for government regulation of fees in this wild wild west world of merchant processing. Read any application and you will quickly learn that the processors can and will hold batches from the merchant, impose fees that are not covered by the original contract, demand reserves in excess of risk, raise discount fees and transaction fees twice yearly (never going down - only up).. The list is long. There is absolutley no protection for the merchant who signs the application. Totally one-sided to the processor and absolutley unfair to the merchant. Unfortunately for merchants and business owners, one processor's application is virtually identical to another processor's application. They must get together annually in the Caribbean or Vegas and have a "collabrative group discussion". To make it even worse, all contracts have what is called an "Early Termination Fee" (ETF), usually it is between $300 and $400 to cancel service of processing credit cards with your provider. So if you don't like the service you are provided then you can leave them and pay this ETF. Wonderful! What incentive for good customer service and retention?
They will simply charge you for their lack of customer service and for leaving them. You should fight them on this issue also. Most processors have the option of reversing this ETF. So stay on them until they do it!
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