Axia Payment Processing Registered with Merrick Bank Holding 3500 dollars hostAge because I have have a paypal button on my website. Santa Barbara, CA Nationwide

This comment was also left as a review on BBB, however we were not notified of this comment being left on this site as well. Below is the response that was posted by Axia’s Director of Operations on 12/29/15:

Business Response:

There are a few issues with the customer’s statement of the problem. The first error is the date which this “problem occurred” of 9/1/15.  Get Drizzled did not start processing until 9/13/15 so it could not have started at that time and she could not have contacted us about this on 9/1/15 as she claimed.  There were no breaches of contract as she and allegedly her attorney claimed.  Axia placed the online account on 100% reserve due to their website not meeting the URL guidelines required by Visa and the other card brand associations.  These requirements are clearly listed on the merchant agreement. 

Also the terms and conditions of the agreement state that the merchant will maintain compliance with all Card Brand Association requirements.  The contract is very clear that Axia can establish a reserve account for various reasons, including non-compliance.  Get Drizzled’s sales representative, who is actually listed on their contact page as the gift basket coordinator so we can assume that they have regular contact, was notified of this and instructed to work with the merchant to get their website updated to meet compliance standards.  We typically allow the online account to be set up with a reserve before compliance is achieved so that the merchant can push their updated website live for us to review without fear that a customer will attempt a transaction and get declined before we have reviewed and turned the gateway account on yet.

Get Drizzled did set up two accounts, one for face to face retail transactions and one for web transactions and were provided two gateway account credentials. They purchased a swiper for their phone to accept the retail transactions.  Axia was only seeing activity on the web account, which was on funding hold.  As it turns out the merchant mistakenly used the credentials for the web account to set up the app in their phone so it appeared that there were no retail transactions but only web activity.

She left a voicemail with client services on Thursday Dec 10^th but when our support representative called back there was no answer and the voicemail was full so they could not leave a message.  On Monday the 14th we received an email from the merchant, that she claims was sent 36 hours prior but it would have been on a non business day, as well as the BBB complaint notice.  We replied to her email to start dialogue and after hearing that she was running swiped transactions and not using the web store to process transactions we were able to research the details in the transaction logs and release her funds.

Axia support will always return a missed call.  If we were given information on which phone numbers the calls came from I would be happy to check the our phone system logs and messages to validate these missed calls.  Having a full voicemail can make it difficult to verify if someone called you back or not.  Its not really a part of the issue but blaming Axia for her webmaster resigning seems to be a large exaggeration.  Calling this situation financial elder abuse and embezzlement is ridiculous.  Particularly in this case because since the funds are held in a non-interest bearing account at our sponsor bank, which is not in Axia’s name.  This was a simple programming mistake on the merchant’s side.  It was quickly resolved once they communicated the error.