Note: this review is based on my experiences and your mileage will vary.

First a little about my situation: I am a Ruby on Rails developer and I offer a SaaS app over the web. After deploying my application, I decided it was time to looking into offering premium services for a monthly fee. This lead me to ActiveMerchant, which many of you might know as library to abstract away API calls to various Gateways. The gateway I eventually chose was TrustCommerce due to the depth of support that ActiveMerchant has for their API. Also, I can't say enough about how great their support team is.

Now I needed a merchant account to plug into my gateway of choice. After looking around on WHT due to various reviews I chose CDGCommerce. They have good rates, cheap monthly fees and they have a good reputation, so I signed up with them.

Maybe it's my situation, but I got screwed over big time. After the initial set up, I contacted their support team to get plugged in with my payment gateway, TrustCommerce. Suffice to say, 3 weeks later and I'm still waiting for a resolution.

The big problem is that they'll send me one email telling me their looking into it, and won't respond until I nag them. Days go by until I hear a status update, usually to tell me they've taken 1 step forward and 2 steps back. Day by day, my time is wasted on a non-existent payment solution while their support reps churn through who-knows-what.

I'm on week 3 and by the looks of it, this thing is in limbo. Now, from what I understand, it's pretty common to connect payment gateway with merchant account. Maybe CDGCommerce is too busy pushing their own "Quantum" Gateway to open their doors to my gateway of choice. Sounds like a problem to me.

Can anyone suggest for me a good merchant account to mesh with TrustCommerce? I'm tired of this waiting - I need to start making money. I'm sure all you guys can sympathize with a situation where my product is ready to sell, but the payment solution of all things is not cooperating.

To clarify on this particular thread, eo3x0, we have been trying to coordinate the setup of the specific gateway that you requested.

You are absolutely correct in that normally this is a non-trivial process. A front-end file is built and then the gateway is configured to use that front-end file. This process usually only takes 5-10 minutes from start to finish.

However, in this particular case, the TrustCommerce gateway apparently uses the Paymentech Orbital Gateway on the back-end and our relationship with Paymentech was never setup or negotiated with the intent to use that gateway.

As such, it has been a matter of pulling some strings and working through some red tape to get this done for you as we are having to request this and work this out on a custom basis just for your account. You are actually the only person that I can recall who has specifically requested that gateway and it is a non-standard setup different from the way other gateways are normally established.

We setup other gateways every day very quickly whether it is Quantum or Authorize.Net or some of the others. It is also worth mentioning that since Quantum is a gateway we provide for free, there is certainly no financial motivation for us to "push" you towards it - if anything, our staff was just trying to help you get up and running very quickly due to these delays behind the scenes which have mostly been waiting on 3rd parties.

I know that delays are frustrating and believe me - they frustrate us as well. I will check again on the status of where this is standing as there is only one step left at this point in the process.

cdgcommerce, it's good that you guys are so active here on WHT - I actually learned about you guys here while I was a lurker.

I'm sorry for the harsh words - just really really really anxious to get this going. I'm glad to see the process is nearing (hopefully?) the end, and I won't hesitate to update the review to include that.

Hi eo3x0,

Thanks for the reply. I did get an update on this as well just now.

Chase/Paymentech tells us that they are aware of the urgency and per our request they are expediting it and state that it should be setup within "24-48 hours". They will be e-mailing you directly with your access information as this is something that only they can setup, not us.

Again - if this were a normal setup and one of the gateways we regularly provide, this would have been setup within a matter of minutes (weeks ago!) but in this particular instance we had to make a custom request with our front-end network and no one over there seemed to be very familiar with it even though it is their own gateway. It took us going through - and waiting on - several different folks to finally get through to someone to assist us.

My sincere hope is that they do live up to the expectation that they just gave us and you should have that gateway ready to use within 24-48 hours here. If not, contact me directly and I will do everything possible to push them to complete this. Thanks!

cdgcommerce, I did get the information from them as you/they promised. However, I'm not quite sure what to do with it... I'm going to forward it to TrustCommerce to see what needs to be done from here.

I'll keep this thread and review updated as this inches closer to resolution.

(also, it's kinda weird that we're having a conversation here on WHT and with your service rep concurrently, but it's certainly helpful!)

I am currently dealing with an issue with CDGCommerce myself right now.

After using them for going on something like 4+ years now, it's the first time I've ever had any real "issue" that I was concerned about.

While the resolution has not been very fast, I understand that sometimes things take time because the folks at CDGCommerce must deal with their own set of issues that often cause delays. For example, in our situation, the processing bank is not very quick to respond to them, and that causes the delay. It is not the fault of CDG themselves.

So in this I think it's likely the same problem. CDG is most likely working hard on your behalf to get the gateway set up for you, but it's not a simple or trivial issue to do things right sometimes, especially if the setup is non-standard.

Anyway... my point is that I believe CDG is a high quality company, and it's worth waiting and working with them to get things set up. You'll (eventually) be happy you did.

:) Hope that helps.

mrzippy, I totally agree with you - it was probably delays outside of their control.

However, since my first post, my issue has (hopefully) been resolved, and I am now in the process of running some test transactions. What ended up happening is that CDGCommerce interfaces with Orbital/Paymentech which in turn interfaces with TrustCommerce. I'm going to thoroughly run test transactions as there is certainly a possibility of transactions getting lost with 3 layers in between the customer's credit card and my bank account.

Looks like I can't update the first post to reflect this update... too bad :(

I have a major gripe against cdgcommerce. I am so annoyed that I even created an account here at webhostingtalk so that i can voice my complaint (after lurking on this site for a few yrs). I have been trying to sign up for an account with cdg for over 2 weeks. I left a voicemail and never got a response. Then i went on their website and tried to use their "online support" and no one was online so I shot them an email. Still no response after days!! And this is their sales department!!! e-onlinedata is practically calling me every day to get my business and while cdgcommerce who has such great reviews here is completely unresponsive.

usually webhostingtalk is right on with its reviews. I use liquidweb which you guys recommended and love them and have been with them for years but I don't know how anyone could work with cdg unless mine is an isolated case.

... unless mine is an isolated case.
I have never had a problem contacting them.

when i applied for an account with CDG a couple of years ago - they rejected me. they were not too polite either...

Im with cdg.. I think they are excellent. No problems yet except it took a while to get everything setup.

First - thank for the kind words about our service, HVHost, MrZippy, etc. and to the original poster for the positive update on everything here. :)

Regarding the difficulty reaching our sales department mentioned by liejian1, what day/time did you call us? We have folks answering live chat online from around 8AM-8PM every business day and all voicemails create a support ticket in our intranet which is then followed up on.

I have not heard of any other complaints about any difficulties reaching our sales or support teams but I would certainly like to investigate this since you brought it up.

We do everything we can to make our team members reachable through all formats - live chat, e-mail, ticket or toll-free phone and virtually all of our phone calls are returned within hours and certainly the same day or next business morning at the latest.

Please let me know more specifics about how and when you tried to reach us and feel free to PM me the info if you would like and I will be happy to check it out for you and/or assist you with anything that you need.

anton_1980, regarding the fact that you were declined with us a few years ago - what was the reason that you were given?