CyberSource Corporation Cybersource Not Upfront About their fees Mountain View California

My assistant set us up with Cybersource as a payment portal for our online e-commerce store. She researched fee structures of various portals and told me cybersource advertised the lowest rate.

When Our bookkeeper come the reconcile the bank accounts she was unable to establish how much cybersource was charging per individual transaction. They do not make their statements with the fee structure available online and only send you the paper copy.

So we had to go through all our correspondence before we were able to determine what fees they charge. Then again the statements are consolidated per day so they only show you the charges that they charged you per day... They never break it down per transaction. On days where we only had one transaction we noticed fees vary from 2.1% to 3.0% (we made the calculation ourselves). When I requested they re-send us the statements that we were unable to find again in our mail, they wanted to charge us extra for these statements.

I told the support rep that it's unacceptable that a company is so OBSCURE about there fee structure. So I asked her to guide me through the website and point me to the correct reports that I could generate. She could not generate them for me. So I finally made the support rep walk me through EACH charge to tell me what rate they charged as this is somehow visible on her computer screen. It took over 2 hours on October to reconcile 4 months of activities.

Come Tax season April 15 was an absolute nightmare. We had diligently saved each paper statement from cybersource and commenced to piece things together. In order to make sense of the deposit in my bank account we had to generet a capture detail report on their website to know what transactions were processed what day. Then we had to reference back the the paper statement to find out what they charged us in fees that day. It took my accountant forever to reconcile a few simple deposits.

When I confronted cybersource about this level of service and obscurity in their reporting they told me they would be coming out with a new reporting model in a few months from know. Off course they would charge me a fee for this monthly reporting service.

At the end of April, and having gone through tax season my accountant and I decided not to use cybersource any longer. We found a service that charges one flat rate and one flat monthly fee. This allows us to predict the cost of a transaction prior to transaction taking place and their reports are so easy to understand.

So when I spoke to my sales rep Lindsey Rogers this month at Cybersource and explained this to her I got the following response:

"Two things I want to make you aware of is that we have come out with a new merchant account report that we have begun rolling out to our merchants. These reports show the transaction from authorization to deposit and the feedback from merchants has been extremely positive. The other part is that you signed a two year contract 7/15/2008;
terminating within the first year of the contract is a $350 early term fee and terminating in the second year of the contract is a $250.

Please let me know if you would still like to close this account and if so I will send you the required paperwork. If you decide you would like to continue to use this account lets set up a call to go over any issues or concerns you have and work towards resolution."

Again she doesn't mention that the new merchant account reporting comes with a fee and secondly they just informed me that I owe them another $350 termination fee if I want to terminate.

Regardless if I stay with them or not, I owe them more money to get a report that clearly breaks down the fees they charge our company.

When I asked them to produce the document where I clearly outlines my agreement to the termination policies, their agent was unable to produce any written document that I signed. Instead they claim that the person who set up the account online was aware of this agreement because they clicked on every page of the agreement when setting up the online login. In our case this would have been my assistant who is not an officer of the company and can not legally bind the company. They Claim that this form of e-signature is binding.

So guess what they emailed me this agreement, but they didn't include the fee schedule. It's amazing how difficult they make it to inform their clients what their fees are. My intuition tells me this is typical but legally well established fraud where they advertise one low rate and get you with every other fee imaginable when you sign up for an account or try to get out of the deal.

Robert
Dallas, Texas
U.S.A.