Before you process, check the BBB profile

When setting up a merchant account I always recommend to investigate the business that you are considering processing through before you send in any paperwork. You don’t need to do a background check on every employee of a particular company, but looking for obvious signs that a company is doing bad business, is always a good idea.

This morning a news article was released in the Green Sheet (http://www.greensheet.com/forimmediaterelease.html – this link is not permanent), that the company MPI (Merchant Processing Inc.) was halted from doing business on April 12th of this year, due to unethical business practices.

Basically MPI had a number of complaints against them, and it was found that they were not addressing customer service issues, and were not properly disclosing contract terms to their customers. A few years ago a similar situation happened and the company CMS (Certified Merchant Services) was forced to pay $23.5 Million in damages.

What struck me as interesting is that this company had over one hundred complaints with the BBB.

I would say that it is very true that the majority businesses do not do any check into a merchant service provider before they do business with them. It took me only about 30 seconds to pull up the BBB report on this business, and in my opinion 104 complaints is definitely a red flag.

So, to anyone looking at finding a new processor, or to anyone looking to process credit cards for the first time: take a few minutes and check out a business before you sign with them. Even if you only check their BBB profile, it will at least avoid the most obvious of bad situations.

You can do a BBB search here: http://search.bbb.org
(Enter the business name and the state and you can normally find the correct business very quickly)