Global Payments Realex Payments, Heartland Complete waste of time and money Atlanta Georgia

I am a veteran independent software engineer and developer who has integrated dozens of different payment systems into sites from small to huge. I have never seen anything as bad as Global Payments.

The company seems to be a disorganized collection of acquired companies. We signed up for a GP test account, and as we get deeper into the online documentation, the actual payment service involved is a 2015 acquisition called RealEx Payments. As we started writing test code, we had a few questions. Several phone calls later, I am told that the only support channel is through an email address. Fine. I sent email, waited several days, and received an adequate response. During this delay, I discovered several more issues. Their documentation is incomplete, and often simply incorrect -- what's written does not match the real-world requirements or results at all. Worse yet, the API is full of gaping holes - basic functionality you would expect to find is absent. When you ask them about it, they just stop responding.

I've dealt with many payment processors over the years, so this is not completely unheard of, just the first of many "red flags." I end up calling Dublin Ireland, trying to track down the RealEx people, who are initially responsive and helpful in solving one problem (out of ten?). As the number of problems begins to increase, though, they refer me to someone at another company in the US, Heartland. This guy is nice enough, but I'm still not getting answers. Turns out, he is relaying my questions back to Dublin! So, I email them again. Almost a week later, I get a response that reads basically, "read the documentation and xxck off." The message apparently being, "what you see is what you get, and we're not going to help you." Thanks.

So, I've wasted FOUR WEEKS doing what should have taken 4 days. Now we're pushing the whole thing back to the corporate client behind this project and we'll see what happens. My recommendation is to avoid Global Payments at all costs. It is definitely not worth the trouble.