When A $922,412 Transaction Goes Wrong

A photograph of a woman holding a credit card in front of a laptop looking perplexed.
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A photograph of a woman holding a credit card in front of a laptop looking perplexed.A few years ago, I did a YouTube video goofing up a $922,412 transaction. Ouch. That’s a lot of money. What would happen if you did a transaction just like that and now your money was held because your credit card processing company doesn’t know what they’re doing?

It happens! And most people are shocked because they didn’t know a credit card processing company can do that.

But they can! Credit card processing companies have algorithms in their merchant accounts set up with certain parameters to hold your funds at certain amounts and based on certain conditions. If you process a large transaction, the system can hold it and guess what, they aren’t going to call and tell you about it.

They’re going to sit back and wait for you to call them. And MAYBE they’ll pick up, but probably not. If you’ve worked with other credit card processing companies, you know they like to automate their customer service line right to their voicemail and then take weeks to get back to you. I call it ‘dialing the 1-800-EAT-CRAP’ line.

These companies often offer the best deals or lowest overall costs to get people in the door. But this is not a place in your business where you want to try and cut corners because you get what you pay for, and you don’t want bad service when it comes to your money.

But say you ignore my voice, sign up with a crappy processing company, and process that $922,412 transaction. Here’s how the whole situation will go.

Your salesperson in your initial call with say, well what’s the highest transaction you might do?

And you’ll say, I don’t know (because you don’t), maybe $3,000?

They say okay, sign you up and BAM, one day you have a great sale and try to process a $20,000 transaction.

Way beyond those thresholds. Right? So just like your bank, when you’ve got, say, maybe $10,000 rolling into your bank consistently every single month and all of a sudden you’ve got $150,000 boom jumped right into your account, the bank’s going to call you up with a few questions.

They’re going to see that as a strange or suspicious transaction and want to know where that money is coming from and you need to be working with a professional, experienced credit card processing company who will be there with you through it instead of taking the phone off of the hook and pretending no one is there when you call.

That’s one thing you need to be concerned with right now, not hiring a professional. When the pandemic hit, cars weren’t being sold. They had to find other sales jobs. Some of them went into credit card processing sales because as you might know, online shopping skyrocketed.

But just because they have knowledge about sales doesn’t mean they have knowledge or experience about the credit card processing industry which can be disastrous for you later.

A good credit card processing company is there for you more than just when you think you need them. We’re always watching out for problems to get ahead of them quickly, making sure your rate structures are correct, that your pricing structures are correct, and that if something does go wrong, we know who to call to get it resolved quickly. If you’re looking to work with a credit card processing company that puts your needs first, call our team and set up and time to talk with my assistant Brenda. We’ll figure out how to get you on the right track.