Oddly enough, CostCo, the discount retail giant, seems to offer merchant accounts alongside their huge bags of doggy food. :rolleyes:

[http://www.costco.com/Service/FeaturePage.aspx?ProductNo=10166089]

Is this offering any good? Do they deal fairly with customers?

They are NOVA resellers -> try http://www.novainfo.com/home.asp directly.

I use to have merchant account with them, but service is suxx - they don't give you much time to respond to chargebacks, customers service is very rude - overall I give them C-

Steven is right about costco using NOVA. Usually costco gets a better rate than the provider is offering publically and slaps theirn name on it as a value added service.

It is also worth keeping in mind that most major retail merchant processors do not provide very adept technical support for Internet merchants.

In the Internet arena, it is important for merchants to sign up with a merchant processor who really understands their business, their marketplace and the many nuances that exist with card not present & e-commerce sales.

Most of the support call centers maintained by some of the larger processors like NOVA are more centered around card present/retail transactions and debugging terminal issues and so forth.

In fact, I'd wager that most of them wouldn't know half of the names of major billing software packages in the hosting industry or how to integrate a Web site with a payment gateway. This is just too far out of the 'norm' with respect to most requests that they handle each day.

The rates that they offer are certainly competitive but still well within the range of pricing that you'll find in the marketplace these days. Hope that info is helpful!

cdgcommerce - I'm 100% agree with you.

Nova lure you with cheap processing rates, but later you will LOOSE ALL of your chargeback requests - because NOVA will says "No signed transation". Back to 2001-2 we lost quite a bit of money because of that. No matter if user is fraud or not - you will loose anyway :(

I suggest don't chase CHEAP rates - pay even 3% processing fees, but make sure your will be backup by your merchant provider.