If you’ve got a small but growing business you’re probably wondering if PaySimple is what you should go with for your merchant account needs. There are plenty of options, so you’re not short on choice, but it can be time-consuming and frustrating going through them all, especially if you don’t choose the right one and have to start the process all over again.
Overview
Accepting credit cards is easy enough to set up with sites like PayPal and CCBill, but if you need a solution to accept eChecks and ACH transactions, you’ll want to get a full fledged merchant account. The only problem is, many of the ones that are out there aren’t exactly the easiest things to get started with and to use. The promise of PaySimple is that they have a friendly user interface, so you don’t have to fumble your way around it, costing you time and potentially money.
The Claim
They say that this is the “easiest way to get paid faster”, and that you can not only accept payments, but you can set up automatic billing for your customers, and also manage them with this software. They don’t make too many big and bold claims, which is nice. They basically just list what they can do, and it’s up to you to see the value in it for your business.
The Cost
It’s $35 a month plus the fees associated with each transaction. This is their best package, and is basically the only one they offer that comes with all of the features. They offer a smaller package at $11 but it doesn’t really do much, whereas the Pro package does everything, and is all you’d ever need going forward.
The Commitment
Even though they boast about how easy their system is to use, you’re still going to have to spend some hours getting used to it, and exploring all of its different features. When it comes to collecting payments, you’re talking about the cashflow of your business, so it’s worth the time it takes to learn how to maximize what it is you’re paying for here.
Evaluation
Having a service like this that is basically in the cloud and lets you log in securely from any computer is nice. Rather than having to set everything up at your office computer, it’s nice to be able to log in and check how your business is doing from just about anywhere.
There’s also a wealth of information provided about how to incorporate the PaySimple service into your business. It is a good use of your time to learn about all they can do for you, and there are even lots of tips on how to streamline how your business takes in orders.
Perhaps the best way to get an idea of whether or not you’ll jive with their software is to try out the demo and review the features for yourself. It basically allows you to play around with the different transactions and you can see how the interface is laid out. You’ll be able to know pretty quickly if this is something that your business would benefit from.
Final PaySimple Review
For this review we’re giving PaySimple our Thumbs Up rating, citing ease of use, ease of getting started, and cost. At this price point there aren’t a lot of other merchant accounts or payment processing systems that offer as many features, but keep it easy to use. There’s also the matter of support. There are plenty of merchant accounts out there that have horrible support, but the folks at PaySimple seem to know this and they make it a point to highlight their service and support as being top-notch.
This is an important decision to make because what you don’t want is to get all set up with one provider, and then find out that you need to change to a different provider after a few months or so. Take the time to get it right at the beginning and find something that you can use long-term. We like that there aren’t a bunch of different tiers like you find with other systems. There’s basically just one package that serves the needs of most small to medium sized businesses. If your business skyrockets and you turn into the next tycoon, you’ll have to upgrade your system anyway, but this one can scale to fit most owner’s needs.
Our Recommendation
If your business needs a payment processing solution, you should look into PaySimple and compare it to other systems that have caught your eye. They don’t have a free trial, so be sure to play around with the demo for a bit and see if it’s something that will do the trick for your specific business. There’s no way to make a blanket statement about what will work for every small business, as they’re all unique in what they need and what will work for them.
Not only did Paysimple make a mistake on my payroll which cost me thousands of dollars, but I am now fighting to have them quit billing me each month even though I notified them two years ago that I was quitting them. They told me when they made a mistake that they would pay for the penalties, which THEY DID NOT do. Then they keep billing me for a service they don’t provide. These people are out to rip you off in every area. I went to Gusto and am happy. I just want to warn everyone to stay away from these money hungry clowns. They can’t even provide the service they claim to offer.
Paysimple is a bit of a sham company that brings you in with promises of quick easy processing then turns you over to a bank that does the processing and the bank will charge your customers then withhold funds from you. This is just another scam operation with pay simple signing you up and skimming off the top of your funds which both they and the bank collect immediately, them holding your funds from you. I have done business with many processors and still do in my other businesses, the reason I chose this company is because of the recurring payment program and right now my customers are getting charged but my funds are being with held. I would recommend you do not do business with this company if you want to get paid. They are a rip off
Paysimple advertises in many sites that they are huge on Merchant Education. This is not even close to being true regarding my experience in a short 30 days with this company, as their merchant education is non-existent. We signed up with http://www.paysimple.com a month ago, and the setup and getting started was a nightmare because there is absolutely NO communication from the beginning that left us clueless as to what is being setup for our company. They do not reveal full disclosure of all rates and fees, who you are processing with, what are the charges, when charges are coming out of your account, who is taking money from your account, and so on. You sign up on their website and they send you an email that you are approved, give you login info to their online payment software, and tell you that you can start accepting credit cards. But they tell you nothing else. We had to call several times to get more information about what is going on. You don’t even sign anything, and they never provide you a full merchant application agreement you can sign and agree to. The only thing they provided us was a blank 1 page PDF doc with a list of about 10 fees, and it is not complete, no company names on it, does not tell us who we are processing with, and does not disclose full rates and fees, and terms and conditions. We then start seeing money debited from our account and we have to initiate a call to ask questions. They will then tell you that you are processing with North American Bankcard as the ISO processing your credit card transactions. We then see withdrawals from our account from global, and we were ready to call our bank to initiate reversals of these charges. We call paysimple and they tell us that global is the processor that NAB uses. So global is the company that is really doing the processing for us, not PaySimple or NAB who are just the middlemen. And we were going to reverse the charges from global because no one ever told us about NAB or Global. We never received a full merchant agreement and contract with full disclosure of the terms and processing rates and fees. NAB then decided to put a hold on $400 of transactions from our company to do a review. We provided signed payment authorization forms from our customers for all of these transactions. It took them 12 days to do their review and release our funds. 3 days later they tell us NAB is closing our merchant account with no explanation. What a waste of time. Why would they approve your account in the first place and let you process credit cards, only to close your account 30 days later after they finally decide to review your account and decide not to allow you to process with them. We spent hours learning their software and setting up recurring billing accounts, only to have the online account locked. They should have declined us from the beginning and just tell you upfront your application is declined. This was a huge nightmare, absolutely no communication, and Paysimple seems to be setup to provide excellent customer service with very friendly customer service, big on merchant education, and so on. But the way they do business, set you up, leave you in the dark of who you are really doing business with, no disclosure of fees, and no explanation of who is taking money from your account, is unacceptable and scares me as a business owner that I was going to close my account with them anyways because I would never be able to trust a company that does business this way, especially when I have to rely on them to process our transactions and whether they would deposit your money or not to your bank account. I would not recommend doing business with PaySimple until they change their policies and practices. This represents a total failure to do good and honest business with merchants. They will probably come back and respond and say something like we are high risk with bad credit or something, but this does not excuse them for everything I described above. And if they have their reasons to not allow us to keep a merchant account, then just decline our application from the beginning and not waste our time, and not let us process with them for 30 days and then close our account. Don’t waste people’s time and money.