Capital Merchant Solutions: anyone used them?

I'm looking to set up a merchant account and was referred to them by the UltraCart people, apparently they take almost anyone no matter their credit.

These guys are are my backup plan in case wells fargo rejects me, but their website looks pretty frontpaged. http://www.chargem.com/


Their fee structure is:

2.19 for visa and mastercard
2.67 for discover +10c per transaction

9.95 for a statement fee per month (goes to bank I guess?)
9.95 gateway fee per month (goes to them)

25c per transaction
05c address verification fee per transaction
20c batch processing fee per day

This seems pretty cheap, slightly cheaper than wellsfargo who charges

31.95 per month
30c per transaction
approx 2% for cc fees

So has anyone heard of these guys or have any recommendations on a merchant account?

thanks!

There are a bunch of merchant account providers. Be sure to find out what the rate is for "partially qualified" and "non qualified" tranactions. This is one of the areas where they can really sock it to you. I've seen non qualifed rates above 5%.

Fully qualified means both the address and zip match bank records. Partially qualified means only one of these match. I've never seen a processor charge extra for address verification. All transactions get run with address verification, so their transaction fee is 30 cents.

Ask to see a merchant account agreement with all charges before you sign anything.

Sounds like a pretty good deal, but like the other poster said, make sure to ask the tough, detailed questions.

You may also want to visit cardservice Int'l and checkout their Linkpoint gateway service. I've found it to be pretty simple and economically reasonable...and I hear that they are pretty lax on qualifying you for the account as well.

I would like to whine about my experience with CMS (This was a very bad experience) but I will tell you what the charges from US Merchants are. I asked the rep if there are separate charges from other agencies and I was told no. The following are the only charges charged!

$249 one time fee for 36 months (I opted for this option)
or
$19 +- each month for 36 months = $684 total cost

* 2.25% per transaction

* $2.52 fee per $100 of sales

* Statement charge of $7 per month

* Annual fee of $49.00

* batch fee of $.30 per day when transactions take place

* $10 monthly gateway fee

* $.10 charge per transaction

* Activation fee of $99.00

I was told this is it! No one else will charge me anything.

They tend to sneak other charges in on you. For example if a credit card is doing a 1% rebate to the card holder that rebate is often passed on to the merchant. They wear the white hat and you pay the bill. They don't tell you this when they sign you up but if you can decipher the statement and call about all of these additional charges that is when they will finally tell you.

It doesn't quite work like that.

All credit card rates for Visa and MasterCard are based on something called Interchange. Interchange outlines the fees to be charged for different kinds of credit cards under different circumstances. There are about 200 different levels of Interchange. Check cards cost less then credit cards which cost less then rewards cards which costs less then business cards. The processing banks take those 200 levels and group them together in to tiers to simplify the rate structure they have to work with and their people have to sell.

The problem lies when sales agents only disclose some of those groups and not all of them. Then when you take a credit card that is not in the group you were told about (which is usually the lowest priced group) you see a higher rate being charged. This rate will be in your paperwork that you signed somewhere so they technically aren't being fraudulent so when establishing a merchant account always read the paperwork over thoroughly and do your homework first to make sure you know what questions to ask when talking to a sales agent.

In the case of the quote listed above there are more fees. Plenty of them.

You could check with few more processors especially for the fee structure depending on your requirement;

charge.com
2checkout
chronopay
authorize.net
protx
worldpay

Authorize.Net is not a payment processor. They are only a payment gateway. And since they are in the US 2checkout, worldpay, chronopay, and protx would be bad choices due to their high prices. They'll do much better with a true merchant account.