In October of last year I was looking to get lower rates for Credit Card processing and I stumbled upon a company called Collective Point of Sale and spoke to a salesperson named Robbie Clarke. Their rate of 1.49% seemed the best so I went with them.
The quality of service, transaction speed and customer service were mediocre at best but that's not what bothered me the most.
I run a small business and Rob Clarke assured me that the bottom line of my bill would also be extremely low (1.49% was by far the lowest rate I could find). He told me $7/month as a monthly service fee, $30/month for the terminal and 1% 'non-qualified' which would rarely happen.
Robbie Clarke assured me there would be no hidden charges (which the by far the most important thing to me). Much to my dismay that was a complete lie. I've compiled a list of charges below which Robbie failed to tell me about.
1. The monthly service fee is charged TWICE since it is charged once per Merchant ID (apparently they are a third party provider of Elavon) and there would be 2 Merchant ID numbers.
2. The per transaction fee of $0.10 is charged twice. After reviewing the contract it says "auth/per item fee: $0.10" and I've been informed that those are 2 different fees!
3. That 1% is being charged on 90% of transactions, not the 10% that Robbie said meaning I'd really being charged 2.49% 20 cents.
4. $4.99 Protection Plus fee. Apparently this was not in the contract and it's a fee for an imprinter they sent me without my permission
5. $4.95 Loss and Damage Waiver fee
6. $20 monthly minumum. On top of that I'm told that the minimum is charged per card and even applies to debit so I would need to do 250 debit transactions in order to meet the debit minimum (I do almost no debit transactions).
Their customer service is somewhat helpful by at least informing me of this but Rob Clarke is now screening my calls and not answering. And it would cost me over $2000 to cancel since I would 'have to pay out the lease'.
I don't know what to think of this. The bottom line of my bill is has increased almost 10% because of this switch. If you do ever decide to do business with Collective POS, don't do it with Robbie Clarke.
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