trinorthlighting - 2:14 am on Jun 18, 2010 (gmt 0)

Reserves and chargeback ratios are a norm. If your processor feels like they need to start a reserve they should have contacted you first to let you know and discuss how to set up the reserve without hurting your company. They gave you very poor service.... Pay Pal made a mistake of locking our account down once for a week over a $48 chargeback. Guess what we did, we dropped them. Funny thing is, they have contacted us quite a few times wanting our few million dollar a year volume back and as long as I run the company, the answer is no....

Since you are not getting great service, I would find another processor and drop your current processor. As soon as you find your new processor, set up shop and make all the changes you need to on your site contact your old one, close out the account and see how long they will hold your reserve. Typically that time period is 180 days and if they want to hold on to it longer contact an attorney.

It might not be a bad idea to also have a back up processor. We currently use authorize, but we also have Google checkout as well. We currently have Google checkout integrated into our sites already but not available for customers to use because Google checkout has higher processing rates. The idea behind that is that if something were to happen to authorize, it would take us about 3 seconds to turn authorize off and google checkout on and still run normal operations. Last year, authorize had a data center fire and were offline for about 48 hours. We went to our site, flipped a switch and customer ordering was not impacted at all.

I hate to hear that this happened to you and I wonder if your bank was one of the banks that missed their recent TARP payments....