Fiserv (formerly First Data) and ICICI Merchant Services combined a payment gateway and point-of-sale software and hardware solutions with features such as card & check acceptance, and merchant mobile commerce solutions, and ecommerce gateway. First Data merged with Fiserv in July 2019. Similar capabilities are now supplied by Fiserv Carat.
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Verifone Point
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Verifone Point is a point-of-sale software solution with features such as payment simplicity and flexible service.
The arena of companies to choose from to process credit/debit card payments at this level is ridiculously small. I was told which one we would be working with, and am unaware how the others compare(especially on processing fees), but I can only assume that they would be better to work with than FirstData after the overly complicated process we have gone through over the last couple years when we were told it would easily take less than a year.
VeriFone Point definitely knows the VeriFone payment hardware and support tools. They work with many businesses using this hardware, so their remote management tools are thoroughly capable of handling this hardware. This allows them to meet the needs of a small deployment, maybe 20 terminals or fewer. We quickly found out that we would have been better off setting up our own tools and staff to support our deployment of VeriFone hardware. Based on the number of terminals we have in use, our geographical span, and hours of operation, we need to address issues more quickly and personally than VeriFone Point is able to. While they are responsive, their tier I support is pretty generic and mostly assists with power cycling.
Knowledge and experience: Point supports many businesses with many VeriFone terminals throughout the country. Therefore, they have much experience with the hardware.
Availability: When calling for support, it is rare to not get a response from a human. Some calls are answered after only minutes of hold time, others can take much longer, but a human is almost always available.
[In my experience,] merchants will just follow this scam service and they will say they provide a refund to the customer but actually they will not do anything just use your money by giving unnecessary excuses.
Bureaucracy: Since this is the payment industry and a very large company, they move slower than an iceberg with most projects, including ordering new terminals or adding new features.
Availability of project support: Aside hardware troubleshooting, it often feels very difficult to get help from Point support for things like opening a new location, adding a feature, or making other changes requiring any level of planning.
Inconsistent support staff: One issue may be handled very differently by different support staff. We often work with somebody for hours on one issue only to call back later and have the same issue solved in minutes by a different person.
We had previously used Elavon Merchant services. We found the provider to be more expensive and offer far less flexibility for our processing. Also, our processing was entirely manual and had to be done in the office.
We started using VeriFone Point when we switched from software-based credit card processing to VeriFone payment software. With our previous software system, we had a similar experience with support to what we have experienced with VeriFone Point. Support for payment industry tools tends to be excessively pragmatic, to the point where they ignore symptom clues while having us power cycle hardware for the fifth time.
Sales have increased in the past year because I have a dedicated site to selling products that people used to have to come in person to order. First Data along with putting everything up on my website definitely makes it easy for me to automate things.
