WEPAY and Appraiser Credit Card Processing

I don’t know about your experiences as an appraiser with credit card processing but I have struggled to offer my clients a way to may payments via credit cards.  First I tried Authorize.net and that worked for a while, until they decided it was time to charge me large fees when I wasn’t using their services.  Apparently you need to keep feeding the beast or it will bite you.  They tortured me for years trying to get my business back but who wants to do business with someone who charges them for not making enough money?

So I switched to Square.com and paid them a sign-up fee.  Who charges a sign-up fee when they are making money on every transaction?  I went through a painful experience with SQUARE during their start-up period when all of my customers didn’t recognize the card charges on their statements because instead of using my business name they were processing payments using some other name that Square decided on.  After about six charge-backs and 90 days of pain I stopped using SQUARE.  In my opinion SQUARE was a nightmare. 

I quit them and then got an assignment that had a client who insisted on a credit card payment.  I went back to SQUARE and they accidently changed a digit in my bank account number.  Of course they claimed it was all my fault but I had memorized the account number years before and there is no way that it was my error.  The bank had to get the money back from another account holder and I waited patiently without my funds for a long time until it was resolved. 

Recently I tried ZOHO with WEPAY as the credit card processor, it was easy to sign up, I will give them that.  At present however WEPAY has my funds frozen in limbo land.  WEPAY is supposed to be a financial tool but, as with the others, it’s turned into a financial nightmare.  Big banks like Chase think that once the money comes to them it becomes their money not your money.  They want to float it and make more while you wait and wait for them to get around to releasing it to you.   I have seen good, fast, credit card processing and WEPAY isn’t it. 

When are the banks and credit card processor’s going to learn that ignore, ignore, ignore is not the best way to keep happy customers.  I know it is insane but CHASE / WEPAY only responds to its “customers” via email.  So if you are like me that take your credit card payments and then they tell you after 24 hours of non-responsiveness why they didn’t give you the money that your hard work earned.  So you didn’t respond to the micro-payments they made to your bank account (which never came), they don’t care, they have your money.

Chase is much like Uber, take your money, hold money that’s not theirs in “reserve” but make sure that no one can call them on the phone.  You don’t want to have to answer questions about why you are holding thousands of dollars of their money.   It must be security issues, and they think people believe their crap?  It’s the business model from hell and I try to avoid it as often as possible.

For a while I was using VENMO at www.venmo.com and it was heaven compared to many of the others.  Lightning fast transfers and straight to your bank, but since I have a relatively few transactions each month I stopped using this service for a while.  They have limits on the dollar amount of the transaction but I have never hit their limit.  After my WEPAY experience I am sure that I will shift back to VENMO again.

There are so many rules related to using a processor that it’s difficult to know them all when you sign up.  They give you access to them but who has the time to read them all?  You may think that you can get by without having to call anyone, yes you’re a website wizard, but one glitch and guess what, they are holding your appraisal fees in their account indefinitely.  I have been down the dark card processing path and you don’t want to go there.

Update: Yes, I did eventually get paid.  Chase paid me based on the running balance in my bank account.  Its funny but no one told me anything about all these rules when I signed up.  I cancelled the service, I'm just not compatible with credit card processing rules.  If you do some reading you will find that charge-backs can happen many months later and then you have a whole new problem.  If a client pays me for an appraisal services with a check it is a crime for them to not honor it or to stop it.  If they pay me with a credit card they can wait a year and charge-back the funds and I have to do battle with someone like Chase Bank.  Is there any doubt about which payment method I prefer?

For more appraisal information contact Glenn J. Rigdon MA, MRICS, IFAS, ASA is a Las Vegas / Henderson Nevada based appraiser who can be contacted via email or via his business website known as Appraiser Las Vegas  (http://www.appraiserlasvegas.com), or http://www.horizonvillageappraisal.com, or you can also click on “Contact Us” on the home page of this website or visit my public profile at LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/pub/glenn-rigdon-ma-mrics-asa/1a/30b/879/

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