Starting my e-commerce store in July I admit I did not look around a whole lot before choosing a plan and beginning the process of establishing a Merchant Account.
For those that are not familiar with the process, the most common way is to have a "Merchant Service Provider" that handles your money transfers and a service called a "Gateway" provider. This is usually a separate company that you connect with to process the actual credit card information and validate the sale. After validation, your information is passed along to your Merchant Service Provider and they handle the money exchange, take their fees and deposit the rest into your account.
Now after some ground work, the problem:
I established a Merchant Services" account with a company called OnlineDataCorp. That is located at
2 Westbrook Corporate Center, Suite 200
Westchester, IL 60154
While attempting to jump through all the hoops required to setup this kind of account, an error occurred, OnlineDataCorp created two accounts. Thirty days later I receive a statement telling me I paid for two accounts. I never received a refund for the $54.00 they charged me for the mistaken second account. Every time I had to contact them, They STILL had me listed in two accounts - A freakin' nightmare! - Strike One
We received an email with the message title reading "Gateway Maintenance" stating that our account MAY be disabled due to a security breech occurring. They indeed had disabled our account because during reading this email, we received an email from a nice lady that was trying desperately to purchase some items and could not because it could not verify her credit account. We lost countless sales due to this! During the process of starting the account back up, which by the way took a three way call between OnlineDataCorp., The "Gateway Provider" (Which will remain nameless due to receiving excellent service from) and myself 15 minutes to straighten out, I spoke privately with the Gateway Provider and he informed me that the security breach was due to the way OnlineDataCorp created the merchant account names. OnlineDataCorp. Had told me just 10 minutes before that the "Gateway Provider" was hacked. Too much buck passin' for me! Strike Two
Starting the New Year out running rather smoothly, all of a sudden, the transactions were being process, but none of the money was showing up in our account. Now I'm thinking - Strike Three! What's going on now? So I call them up, establish which account is the right one and finally get to some answers, I find out they have a "Re-newel Fee".. A what I ask? I have exclusive rights to the account and have never been informed of this? Well it turn's out they are holding my money because they could not get the funds out of the account to cover the "Re-Newel Fee" (I still to this day, don't know which account they tried to get their money out of, We had over $400 in there and the "Re-Newel Fee" was only $99??). Well this was Strike Three! I told her, I want to terminate this account immediately! After a long, rather distasteful conversation with them refusing to listen or even re-check their self's, I had to send them a FAX with my signature on it with the words "Terminate Account" TWICE to get them to cancel the account.
And the kicker to the whole thing - I found out Jan 8 about the "Re-Newel Fee" cancel my account and you want to know something, they illegally access the business account and (tried) to take $54 and some change for the entire month of January - and they only process three sales and didn't even transfer that, they kept it!
In Conclusion:
Please ask questions and look they other way if you see their flashy ad... It's not worth the trouble.
Needless to say, we no longer use them or the bank they are affiliated with (Quad City Bank)!
Good riddens!!!
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