Ah, merchant services, I hear from them about daily.
They are slightly useful. Every few years I’ll let someone come out and see how much they can offer off transaction fees, then I’ll call up my bank and see if they want to match it. They always do, and when the merchant services calls back to see if I want to switch, I tell them that I used the information they gave me to get my bank to come down on fees.
They get a bit upset, but it’s not like I solicited them to come out.
How do you folks get the luxury of talking to the callers?
I seldom answer now. A few years ago I could engage them.
Now, if I do answer, nobody is there. So I normally let my cell phone send ignore unknown callers, and take a message. I’d say 10 percent leave a message, maybe five percent.
I sometimes ask them if their mother knows they cheat people over the phone for a living. They curse and hang up when i say that.
Call up your current processor and ask for a rate review. IME, you can do that once every 6 or 12 months and, again IME, you can usually get the rates knocked back down. When I do let people see my statements they almost always mention that they’re already pretty low (because I stay on top of it). Plus, since I won’t switch unless you can save me at least one or two hundred bucks a month, we don’t switch very often.
I always think it’s funny when someone quotes me on rates and tells me they can save me “about $175 a year” or something like that. We spend about $40,000 a year on processing fees. I’m not going to buy new equipment, train all my employees and everything else involved in making that kind of switch for $15/mo. And that $15 will evaporate the first time any of their fees go up or as soon as I get the first statement and see all the fees they ‘forgot’ to mention.
And the other thing that pisses me off with them is when they say things like 'well, you’re paying the most for non-qualified cards, you should stick to mid qualified or qualified. TF am I supposed to do with that info? I like to pull a random credit card out of my pocket, show it to them and ask them if this is non-qualified, mid qualified or qualified. If they can even come up with an answer, then I follow it up by pointing to my high school cashiers and asking how they would know.
I see this heading towards shifting the cost to the consumer. Not in a ‘we have to raise our prices’ way. More like your total is $50, but your card will get charged $51.50 to cover the 3% fee that we would otherwise be paying. I know the technology is out there, I know some bars and restaurants (and maybe regular stores on the West coast?) have started doing it. But if it picks up steam, I think consumers will very quickly decide that they’ll come out ahead by getting a card with lower rates and no rewards rather than great rewards but higher rates.
Remember, if I use my credit card with 5% back, you still have to help pay for that, even though you’re paying cash (assuming you don’t pay more or less for cash vs credit).
You pick up, say hello, wait for the little ‘bloop’ sound, then listen for the the boiler room background chatter, then you can talk to them. More often than not, in the few seconds all that takes, I’ve stopped caring and already hung up.
I used to have a great bank manager who would actually call me up to review my rates with the credit card processor about once a year. He got promoted, and the replacement hadn’t been as proactive. I was actually paying a fairly high rate at the time they called me up.
I suppose I will simply thank them for reminding me to review my rates from now on.
There’s nothing they can do about the interchange rates, what Visa or Mastercard charge, it’s just their surcharge on top that is negotiable, and it’s really not that high in comparison. Even if it was free, it would still only save a few hundred a month at most.
I’d still probably have to review rates with them yearly, and they don’t have an office to do so less than five minutes away.
Bonus points for if they can tell with it never leaving the client’s hand. I don’t handle the cards, the client has their own side of the machine to put it in. Half the time I can’t even tell what brand it is.
It’s a scam, but I found the only way to fight it is to join it. I have my own rewards card that I use for all my purchases.
If charging different rates caught on, then I’d change to a lower card or even cash, but I don’t think it will. It’s a hassle for the merchant, and customers like to complain. I don’t think I’d implement it in my shop unless it was extremely prevalent.
I answer the phone whenever it rings. Even sometimes when the Caller ID says “Spam Risk” it turns out to be a client. When I hear the pause and “bloop”, I often hang up, but depending on what I’ve got going on and how bored I am, sometimes I talk to them for a bit.
Maybe next time I’ll just try to strike up an idle conversation about the weather, or go the other way, and start a heated debate about a controversial subject like gun control.
And honestly, I prefer the “bloop” to the automated “Hi, I’m Bob Hansen…”
I usually like to answer those calls with “What’s up, Spam Risk? How you been?”
But leaving out something like a 50¢ closeout/batch fee and the $15/mo savings is gone. But if they can really save a few hundred dollars a month, I’ll listen to what they have to say.
Along those same lines, another thing I hear (and I’m hearing right now as were actively looking at some new processors) is “We have an $xx/month fee, but that that will be about the same as what we can save you”. Then you didn’t save me anything, now did you? I’m not a big fan of that method of fee justification.
That’s like a cell phone provider justifying a $10/mo fee by saying “But we’ll be able to save you at least that much because our data plan is $10/mo less”.
Yeah, I’ve mentioned that as well. Even if I could somehow tell how much I’ll get charged based on a card and even if I could ask the customer to use a different card that would cost me less, it’s rare to even see it. In fact, as more and more merchants added customer facing terminals, they (the merchants) mostly stopped looking at signature boxes. Honestly, I can’t tell you the last time I pointed to the “CID” and asked for their ID. Hell, when covid hit, I changed the settings so it stopped asking for a signature unless the sale is over $100.
I actually put all my business charges on my card as well. I probably end up with $500-$1000/yr in rewards doing that.
That’s where we are. We have no interest in doing that, yet. As soon as the big box stores (ie Kroger/Meijer) start doing it, we’ll give it some more thought.
How about this case: Someone I know that owns a bar/supper club adds a surcharge (lets call it 3%) to the tip portion of a credit card charge. So, for example, if your bill is $200 and you tip $50, instead of getting charged $250, you’d get charged $251.50. What he’s trying to do is get people to tip in cash. His reason being that, since he gives the tip to the wait staff, he doesn’t want to give them $50 when he only collected $48.50.
I understand the reasoning, I’m honestly not entirely sure how I feel about the practice though. And, to be clear, I’m only speaking about this specific thing, not getting into bigger employer/employee considerations.
Also, to be clear, I’m not defending what he’s doing or even agreeing or disagreeing with it. Just stating that it’s a thing he does and that I’m genuinely on the fence about it.
Come to think of it, I do have one customer that will paypal a tip to me, intended for whoever delivered his order. It always feels a little ‘wrong’ that I hand the $50 to the driver, but only collect $48.50 after the fees. But at the same time I’d feel even more wrong to hand the driver the $48.50 when he was expecting $50. What I’ve tried to do is get the driver to set up a paypal account so this customer can just send the money directly to him and I can stay out of it. FWIW, it’s uncommon for people to tip for what we do, so it’s not a situation that comes up all that often.
On my cell phone, that’s probably fine. On our business line, I’d guess about 25% of the ‘spam risk’ numbers are legit customers calling but their phone number was probably used by a spammer at some point.