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I am posting stories from my job, because
I think they're funny. I've done my best to disguise my company name,
even the industry, and to keep the people I write about and even some details of
the situation anonymous. If you know me, and know where I work, please
don't include details in your comments. I'll have to delete your comment
and reconsider posting these stories.
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We have had the
same credit card processing system since I started with the company. I
don't know any different, so I neither love nor hate it--it is what it is.
You can swipe cards of people who come in in person, or you can go online
to run the card of someone that calls over the phone. Either way, it
e-mails a report at the end of the day, and the money hits our account a couple
days later. At the end of the month, we're charged some fees. In
two separate chunks, oddly, but whatever.
As many of you
may know, someone somewhere decided that the US
I did some
googling, and apparently what happens on that date is that the responsibility
and liability shift. Before that deadline, if you as a vendor take a
credit card payment that turns out to be fraudulent, the banks have to eat it
when the rightful owner ends up disputing it. After the deadline, if the
card was an old non-chip card, that will still be the case. If the card
is a chip card and it was scanned via the chip (and not swiped with the
magnetic strip), that will still be the case. However, if the customer
had a chip card but the vendor swiped it the old-fashioned way using the
magnetic strip, the vendor will be on the hook for the fraudulent charges.
This scares my boss, the business owner, enough that he wanted the new
technology (though we've never had a fraudulent charge in 20+ years in
business--the only CC chargeback we've had was a scammy customer who ended up
losing and we got the funds back after a fight).
So my boss went
down to the bank (yes, WENT not called), and they told us that they partner
with a certain credit card processing system, and they DO have the chip readers
available, so he made an appointment with the rep. She came, we chatted,
it sounded good. She promised the pricing would be about the same, and I
asked for their pricing structure in writing.
She didn't send
that, but she sent a link to some stuff my boss needed to fill out (based on
his personal credit), so I sat him at my computer (his "wouldn't open the
link") and he filled it out. Meanwhile, I still haven't received
anything in writing. A couple days later, she asked if we'd received the
equipment yet. Um, what? Apparently my boss not only filled out his
credit information to qualify, he actually SIGNED US UP without getting
anything in writing. Oops. He didn't seem too concerned about that,
though he'd been all hot and bothered about having the chip-reading equipment.
So the equipment
arrived, and I contacted the sales rep, who had said that she'd help us hook it
up, etc., but she basically told me to call the 800 number if I needed help.
I ended up figuring it out myself, with one call to them to make sure I
didn't need a phone line, just internet. We were up and running.
Did a $1.00 charge to my boss' company credit card, then voided it, just
to verify that it worked.
It's kind of a pain.
The old system, you had to log into the website first regardless of how
you were going to process the card. Then once logged in, there was a
choice to either swipe the card or manually enter it. For someone
standing in front of me, I'd click swipe, swipe their card, then enter a couple
of fields for the dollar amount and the invoice number, and boom, done.
Print the receipt for them to sign, easy peasy.
Now, in-person
transactions are done entirely on this terminal a little bigger (and a lot
thicker) than a cellphone. You hit a button to wake it up, hit a couple
more buttons, swipe or insert the card (depending on whether it has a chip or
not), enter the dollar amount, wait a few minutes for it to finally spit out
the receipt, and have them sign. Overall probably doesn't take much
longer, but my fingers fumble with the keypad vs. using a real computer
keyboard, so I prefer the old method, but whatever.
To process
transactions where the person isn't physically here with the card, you log on
to a website. Fine. Slightly different format, but actually asks
for less input (last system required billing address, which was weird), so it's
all good. However, the old system let us save customers' card info
securely, which was great both for local customers that wanted to be able to
send someone else to pick up their product, but authorize payment ahead of time
over the phone so they didn't have to give them their actual card. And
for long-distance customers who just wanted to be able to say "run my card,"
or even authorize us to just automatically run it after invoicing. The
new system apparently does not do that. It seems from their materials
that if you pay enough, they'll let you set up recurring charges, but ours
aren't the same amount every time or on a set schedule, so that doesn't work
for me. I've already had a few customers get kind of irritated that they
have to re-provide their CC info every time. So I'm starting to make use
of our accounting system's ability
to save the card info, but of course it doesn't "talk" to the CC
system, so I have to hand-copy the information (can't copy and paste!) it every
time. Ugh. Plus the old system would e-mail a receipt to our
customer after I charge their card, and it appears the new one doesn't.
Oh, and the
online part costs extra. Of course. (Old system is just one set fee
per transaction, no matter which way it's done, plus of course the percentage
fees we're charged.)
THEN it turns out
that the two systems (desktop doohickey for processing actual cards and online
module for processing them long distance) don't talk to each other. So
they make separate deposits in the bank, and you have to go both places to
print off the reports in order to get the details on the transactions that are
being deposited. Plus neither report provides as many details as the old
system did. WHY does it have me put in the invoice number if it's not
going to help me out by including that information on the report? Ugh.
So already I
wasn't thrilled with the new system, but part of that is just hating change,
and whatever. I can deal with it, and the boss is happy that he won't be
liable if someone uses a stolen card, so it's all good, right?
Until I'm
reconciling our bank account and see a $10,000+ charge I don't know about.
Um, WHAT? It, of course, has absolutely no helpful information.
In fact, the gobbledygook mess of letters and numbers looks very similar
to the deposits we take to the bank in person. Weird. I call them,
and they tell me it's from our brand spankin' new credit card processing
company. Um, I'm pretty sure they didn't tell us it would cost THIS much.
I tally up the charges we did with them, and they're barely over $11,000,
so that would mean an effective rate on the processing fees of well over 90%.
Yeah, no.
Do I have a
statement from them? Of course not. I e-mail the sales rep that
we'd worked with, and she says she signed us up for online statements "to
avoid the fee of having them mailed." What?!? It costs money
for them to send us statements? Of course it does. She gives me the
website to go to, and I do, but the account ID I use to log in to the
processing website (which, of course, is an entirely different website) doesn't
work. I e-mail her back and she gives me the correct one. Which, of
course, I'd never seen before.
I finally get
logged in to the website and get my temporary password changed and find where
to go to see my statement. Yup, that's the same dollar amount we had hit
our bank account. It has $10,639.00 in "other fees." Now,
we were expecting a few hundred dollars in fees for the new terminal (of course
they charge for that up front), for using the website (yes, they charge for
that!). At the last of five pages, it finally details the "other
charges." Sure enough, a couple fees that do look correct, and then
$10,000.00 exactly for "App. Fee." Um, what? I'm guessing
this is an application fee, but I wasn't even informed of one, let alone for
$10,000.00. Ah, I see what the problem is--someone entered a quantity of
100 plus a price of $100.00, and I'm guessing it should just be one fee of
$100.00. I dig out the electronic documents we got after the boss had
filled out all his personal information, and sure enough, it outlines the fees,
including the quantity of 100 and price of $100 for an application fee.
So this would appear to be an error done by the sales rep. Ugh.
I e-mail her, and
she says yes, it's an error, and she sees it on her end, too. She's
e-mailed customer service, but recommends I call them and then have them
conference her in if necessary. As of the minute I'm typing this, I've
been on hold for 50 minutes. It's on speakerphone (which probably annoys
the boss and co-worker, but I'm NOT holding a phone to my ear for that long!),
so at least I'm not getting a neck-ache, but still. Ugh. Rep says
they have very long hold times due to everyone getting switched over at the
same time due to the deadlines, but I think they ought to have a dedicated line
for things like this where it's their fault and not just me asking dumb
questions. Ugh.
They picked up at
52 minutes, and then after verifying who I was and explaining the problem, I
waited on hold another 5 minutes or so while the rep looked into it, then she
came back on the line and told me that the sales rep has to generate the refund
and get it approved by their manager. SERIOUSLY? I waited on hold
for nearly an hour for NO reason? Ugh! So I left a voicemail and
sent an e-mail to my rep saying that, and we'll see what happens.
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