Our Bad Experience with First National Merchant Services

This post is a complaint about First National Merchant Services and their account representative Ted Napolitano. If you are considering using this company for credit card processing please read the rest of this post.

In January of 2007 we signed up to transfer our merchant processing services from another company to First National Merchant Solutions. At the time, I expressed concern to the account representative, Ted Napolitano, that we had an existing Authorize.net account with hundreds of recurring billing transactions that we did not want to loose in the transfer process. I was assured by Ted that nothing would be affected and that the existing Authorize.net account would continue to work with the new merchant processing provided by FNMS.

The first month after we switched to FNMS this proved to be false. After placing multiple phone calls to Ted with no response, I had to call Authorize.net myself to set up the account to work with FNMS.

Fast forward 2.5 years later. On May 1, 2009, I found out that my Authorize.net account was closed by my old merchant processor and that the hundreds of recurring billing transactions in that system were no longer available to me. After dozens of phone calls to Authorize.net and the technical support staff at FNMS, I was told that there was nothing that could be done to retrieve those recurring billing records and that I would have to manually enter them back in. This is EXACTLY what I wanted to avoid in switching my merchant processor account. This is exactly what Ted Napolitano assured me would not happen.

On top of it all, First National Merchant Servcies has a $250 early termination fee to close our account. Since we only had six months to go on the account, I asked if I could just schedule the account to be closed now, pay the minumum processing fee and then simply not renew the account. Not possible. Accounts can only be closed 30 days prior to the contract end date. So I could have set a reminder, written the letter in a couple of months and saved a $100 or so but frustration got the better part of me and I just closed it early. I have a letter written to the office of the president explaining the situation. I will make sure to post how it works out.

Moral of the story, make sure you know who owns your Authorize.net account and work with an merchant processor who is going to do what they say. We are working with a new merchant processor. Once I have had a chance to see how things work out, I will certainly post their information.