This company has the worst and the most unqualified customer service ever. This includes basically all departments. I think they are all high school dropouts. The dumbest people I’ve ever had to deal with. It is sad that company like Intuit doesn’t want to do anything about it. Unfortunately if you are merchant you may suffer financially because of that poor service. In my case, first time when I ran into trouble was when they withheld my deposit the first time. Here is what happened. I process online orders in Quick Books. I need to obtain AVS and CVV match in order to protect myself from chargebacks. Unfortunately many customers don’t know the difference between billing and shipping address and sometimes when I run the credit card payment, AVS comes back with “no match” but the payment is still approved. Under QB you can’t use risk tools to block transaction when AVS returns “no match”. Innovative Merchant Solutions doesn’t give you this popular tool. So when AVS comes back with no match, I would have to void transaction, call customer, obtain correct address and run transaction again. I know it is a little technical here, but hopefully some of you know what I mean. The problem is that even if I void first transaction, authorization has been already placed on customer credit card. It will take 7 business days for this authorization to disappear. So in case when customer has limited funds, my other attempt of sale would be declined. Simply there is not enough available credit to put another authorization. Keep in mind that my sales are on average 1000-2000USD. So I called Innovative Merchant customer service. First lady didn’t know what AVS was. When I told her that transaction with AVS match are subject to discounted rates (2.4% instead of 3.1% with no AVS match) she said she had never heard about it and transferred me to another person. She probably has never seen statement that Innovative sends to me every month. So here is another genius. He knows something about AVS. Good, so I asked him how can I run sale again without putting new authorization. Is there a way to cancel or use old authorization. He said yes, just run sale and enter authorization number from previous transaction. Great, so I did it with 2 transactions the very next day. It didn’t take long, few hours later I received phone call from Innovative Merchant Risk Department. The guy says that I ran two sales without valid authorization and I need to refund it right away. On the top of it he withheld two of my most recent batches. When I told him, that it was their mistake and they are responsible for misinforming me, he said that he has no record of me calling them the day before and basically called me a liar. So I refunded money, run transaction again, this time like I did it before, by obtaining new authorization. Thank god customers had enough available credit to cover it. But now my account is locked. The deposits stopped coming to my checking account. Of course when I call Risk Management, every person would have something different to say. In other words no one could explain me when I would start receiving deposits again. It took me 3 weeks of phone calls and emails. Finally I ran into some more intelligent person. Maybe she even had high school diploma. Anyways, she looked at my account and said: “I see no reason for you not receiving deposits, let me fix it”. Two days later money started coming to my account. For 3 weeks my business had been shut down, since I ran out of funds and wasn’t able to accept new orders. But Intuit doesn’t care. So here I am year later. One of my customer made a big purchase. I checked everything about him. Company is legit corporation, and the guy is a president of it. AVS, CVV matches. Billing address matching shipping address. Order placed from company server, company email etc. Everything perfect. So I took the order, send them invoice and few days later they called me with credit card to pay for it. I ran authorization. It went through no problem. Next day we shipped the order and by the end of the day I ran charge. Sale was approved. Great. Next day, Saturday I received an email from Innovative Merchant (I thought they were closed on weekends) requesting invoice for that order, shipping information and customer information. It said that IMS Risk Analyst was reviewing that transaction. I faxed documentation right away. 15 minutes later there is another email informing me that my batch was withheld for time of investigation. This time they refer to Article V section 5.01 of Merchant agreement and requested: bank statement, contract, invoice, shipping documentation. Just like that with no details. What bank statement? So I faxed invoice and shipping documentation again, there was no contract just standard term and condition we have for online sales, and I asked what bank statement they needed. I also referred to Merchant Agreement and article V. Well, it says about accepting checks from customers and method of verifying them. None of this had anything to do with my case. I guess they thought I would never read Merchant Agreement. Of course I email my Analyst about it. No answer of course. But she did specify what bank statement she needed. She says “I need 6 months of your business bank statement summary page only”. Well now you talking. So I faxed her summary pages from last six of my monthly statements. 2 days later I received another email. No “Hello” or anything like that in those emails, just plain text all in lower case. Just like a text message from the phone. It said: “I need 6 month business bank statement summary page only”. OK, I called my bank and ask them about 6 month bank statement. They said: “we can give you 6 months of your monthly statements. We do not produce 6 month statements. If you need some specific information from last 6 months like average daily balance etc. we can get it for you too. What information do you need?” I said “I don’t know, it’s not for me and my analyst wasn’t very detailed. So I emailed my analyst again telling the story. Never heard from her again. When I call her, voice mail kicks in right away and phone calls are not being returned. I emailed her again requesting status of my case. No answer. It is only 11 thousand dollars they hold hostage and no one can tell me when and if ever I will receive that money. I’ve already sent products so I have no money and no products at this point. Also I’ve read in Merchant agreement that they can set limit for transaction on your account without informing you about it. If you go over that limit they will charge you penalties 5%. In my case it may be over $500 in addition to over $300 they will charge as processing fee. This is Ripp Off. I will barely get profit from this transaction. My advice, if you planning on growing your business and make sales of more than $500 stay away from Innovative Merchant Solution. How can you be punished for having more sales than you originally estimated in merchant application? This is what they do. If you go over estimated monthly limit you entered in your merchant application, they will charge you 5%. Just read Merchant Agreement. They simply don’t want your business to grow. And the customer service…. Oh please. How can you be more ignorant and more unprofessional. They do not care about your business. In fact they treat you as a criminal and punish you in advance. It reminds me PayPal. I guess they are not far from that. Although PayPal did improve. If there is anyone there who can help me with my situation, please let me know. Do I have any legal rights I can use in case like this. Just now I received email that my bank statements do not support...(they did not say what) and transaction may be reversed. Great, so I will end up with no product and no money. Letters they emailed me did not say anything about that. They said that deposit may be delayed, but returning money to the customer without any reason for that?

I have sent in my $100.00 in gas receipts from exxon and have not received any gift cards in the past 3 months...I will like to know how to get my gift card...since i have not received any card for the past three months...

Like several others here, I have a large charge that I processed through IMS. Been a customer for 2 years, never had a chargeback, never had any issue whatsoever. They demanded an invoice, sent it. They couldn't get the fax, email-ed it. They demanded bank statements. Again a bad fax, so emailed that. Called and asked for the supervisor. Told me the supervisor was unavailable. LOL. Just read the other complaints. These guys are isolating large charges, taking the money in and using the float. Look at the number of people who posted to this board, just think how many others aren't this vocal. This is an intentional action by this company and if there is any lawyer out there - let's think about a class action here. Surely mother Inuit has deep pockets and I'd just love to make these scam artists pay dearly for all the small businesses they are hurting.

I became a customer of Innovative Merchant Solutions in July of 2007 when I took over an existing small business. It happened fairly quickly so I didn't take the time I should have in searching for a credit card processor. The previous owner used Quickbooks Point of Sale and also used Quickbook's credit card processor, which is IMS in disguise.

After going through the application process which took about 2 weeks, I was informed that due to my lack of credit history and since I was a new business owner, that they required a deposit amount equal to my projected monthly credit card sales. That came out to about $9, 000 US for us at the time so I dipped into my start up funds and sent them a certified check. I was informed over the phone that after a few months of being a customer that they would release these funds back to me. Let me just stress now...get that in writing!!! I was in a rush to open on time and needed a credit card processor so I made some very stupid decisions which IMS took advantage of.

Approximately five months into being a customer I filed a request to have my deposit at least partially refunded. I was promptly denied and told to re-apply the next month when I would have been a customer for half a year. This didn't seem entirely unreasonable so I resubmitted a request a month later. Again I was promptly denied with no reason other than...we can hold your deposit for as long as we want.

This month I did more research and discovered that all the other credit card processors out there don't usually require a deposit and I quickly switched to one of these processors. They set me up in less than 3 days and I immediately notified IMS that I was canceling my account and requested my deposit to be returned. This too was promptly denied and was told they would hold my money for 270 days OR MORE per a contract I signed. When asked for a copy of this contract with my signature the agent got very aggressive saying there was no reason they should send me a copy. I did some digging and unfortunately realized I did sign that after the account is terminated IMS does have the right to hold the deposit for 180 DAYS. I'm resigned to that fact, but I then got a nasty voicemail from one of their service reps.

She said once again it was 270 days or more and to mark my calender and call back to RE-APPLY for my deposit which I'm sure takes several months. She stated that my customers have the right to dispute a statement up to 9 months after the initial transaction. Which is a blatant lie since consumers have 60 days in most circumstances to challenge a purchase. But this being said, our business has always worked hard for customer satisfaction and have absolutely no disputed charges or chargebacks in our history.

Also she chastised me for doing over $9, 000 in credit card sales the last few months and said that was another reason they were holding my deposit. Yet I never received a notice that this was a problem or even a limit mentioned in my monthly statements. I looked at the contract and while it does state they can set limits, I never received notice I was on a limit. Even if I had the contract says nothing about holding your deposit. It only states 'If Merchant exceeds the limit established by this Agreement, IMS may suspend processing, charge over limit fees, hold the funds over the cap and/or return all Sales Drafts evidencing funds over the cap to Merchant.' It never raised any concerns about my increased sales or held any of the credit card transactions processed. Nowhere does it say they can hold a deposit for an extended period of time. But apparently you're penalized for being a growing business by IMS.

For all prospective customers of IMS, I urge you to look elsewhere. They are not worth the trouble and their contracts really place you in a headlock. Also they are the only processor that works directly with Quickbooks, but this is not a license to stomp all over their customers. The other service I now have worked just fine and melds nicely with the Quickbooks POS software. There are a lot more reasonable and business oriented services out there. IMS is not one of these. They make you fight for any sort of customer service and treat you with absolute disrespect. I was a customer for a year with very strong sales and never had a chargeback or any other dispute. Yet they still treat me like some second rate criminal, when all I'm trying to do is get my deposit back. I'm waiting the 180 days like I agreed to per the contract, but after that I'll be filing legal action.

I have read the reviews and I have to agree with them. Quickbooks Merchant Service- run by Innovative Merchant Solutions in my opinion, is a complete joke.

I have been a small business owner for over 13 years and have tried several different services. The lure for me was the convenience of having payments processed from within Quickbooks at the click of a mouse. BEWARE, it comes at a very steep price. Not only are the rates high, the funding time is super-slow and if you need help, forget it. No one there really cares how your business is affected by their mistakes or their "procedures".

If you have any intention of "growing your business", be careful of the limit you can process monthly, which they don't tell you up front. Knowing this before hand, I had asked and was told "There really is no limit as to what you can process". Now it's a whole different story.
We basically were processing more each month and that became a problem. Our account went into review in their "Risk management". I didn't have a problem with that...I've been there before.

What I did have a problem with is the lack of interest in resolving my account issue. Mind you, they basically "hold" your account and you may not receive any deposits from your credit card batches until they say so. For a small business in this economy, this is potentially a slow and agonizing death. Well, 8 days later, 15 unreturned phone calls and countless aspirin, still no one at IMS wants to get this resolved. On day 9, I got a hold of the supervisor, explained how things were handled and basically got a "I'll call you back". Did he call back you ask? No, but one of the repsdid to explain they were going to hold onto my last batch of $9800.00 as a "security deposit" indefinitely. I was shocked...there was absolutely no reason they could give me but to say "read the contract". I asked what would happen if I cancel my account and they said they would not release that batch for 9 months according to their "policies". Needless to say, that hurts a small business like mine and I'm not sure how to make up for that kind of money.

When it comes down to it, this was the absolute most expensive and most frustrating experience I've had with a merchant processor since the day I first opened my doors. I hope this helps future business owners to make a informed choice as to who they decide to use for their merchant service. As for me, I'm movin' on.