Anybody have any experience with Total Merchant Services? Here's the pricing I've been offered for a merchant account.

- $99.00 one time AuthorizeNet license fee

- No application fee

- 2.29% discount rate (Visa & MasterCard)

- $0.30 per transaction fee

- $10.00 monthly gateway fee

- $10.00 monthly bank statement fee

- $25.00 monthly processing minimum

Their website is http://www.totalmerchantservices.com

Thanks,
Richard

We've been using TMS for years, and honestly I can't recommend them. It's not like they're worse than anyone else out there (the whole damned merchant account industry is whacked), but they're no better, either.

Every few months they put a hold on our account and stop depositing our funds into the bank. Then, instead of picking up the phone and calling us (like any normal people would) they send us a letter in the mail to tell us they put the hold on. Of course, it takes 3 to 4 days for us to get that letter, and in the meantime we're writing checks on that money. So we end up bouncing a bunch of checks and then having to wrangle with TMS to get our funds released.

If all you're doing is $20 a month virtual hosting, I think they'd be ok. They were fantastic until the day we started doing managed servers. That's when we started having problems. They see a $600 transaction go through and they start to freak. The sad thing is that it isn't like they do this every month - we could have 3 or 4 months with absolutely no problems, and then for no apparent reason they just decide that suddenly that $600 charge that's been a-ok for the last 4 months this month they're not going to let it slide by, and bam, they put a hold on our account (and not just for the funds on that one transaction - they put a hold for *everything* we process from that moment until the moment they lift the hold).

It's a bunch of bull****, and it's grown very stressful at times trying to deal with them. I should point out that their fears are absolutely groundless - we've had one (I repeat *one*) charge-back in the last 3 years. That's almost a record for hosting companies. We get a signed authorization form with every single credit card account (customers have to fax or mail it back to us), and for the managed servers we have written contracts. All of this we have told them over and over and over again, it doesn't seem to matter, they still hold funds from us every few months.

Don't get me wrong - I don't think they're any worse than any other company in the whole merchant account industry. I suspect that this type of behaviour is just par for the course. But I still had to share the experience.

Good luck,

Jason

Try http://onlinedatacorp.com I never had a problem with these guys and the application fee is cheap and INSTANT.

So far we haven't had any problems with it yet.

It doesn't look like Online Data Corp uses AuthorizeNet. I'd prefer to stick with an AuthorizeNet merchant account since most billing software supports it. Also, it looks like they sneak in a $99 a year fee.

Richard

We use TMS too and have had similar problems. While it is frustrating, they do always take care of it once I call risk management and get our guy on the phone. We monitor our account daily and don't spend before the money is actually deposited into our account. Since we do dedicated and managed servers too, we can sometimes be waiting for days for large sums of money. Oh well, that's the breaks when you have a merchant account I guess...

Do I like TMS, basically yes. I don't like their policies of not calling about a freeze. Other than that, they are great.

I was a Total Merchant Services affiliate. Had major problems in that I wasn't getting paid my affiliate fees. So I dropped out of the program.

That was back in 1998, though.

Run away from Total Merchant Services as fast as you possibly can:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showt...&threadid=94417


Sean R.
BurstNET
System Administration