10-second breakdown:
Perfect for businesses that have a high volume of monthly transactions thanks to their subscription model pricing structure, which equals high quality service and consistent savings for your business. Fattmerchant is a great payment processing company for both virtual and physical stores with lots of sales.
The good:
Fattmerchant offers a fair amount of transparency. Not only with their clear pricing subscription model, but also with what fees are and are not charged, no contracts, and truth in advertising. The company website has links to all the legal documents you may want to check out such as service and processing agreements.
Fattmerchant is compatible with several third party service providers, such as Ingencio, Authorize.Net, Verifone, QuickBooks, and a host of others. A complete list is available on their website or you can contact one of their customer service representatives to check if your software is compatible.
Fattmerchant has a fairly active social media presence. Users can get a quick response from a rep on Twitter or if you prefer they have live chat during business hours. Phone and email support are also available and their support page has a decent FAQ section.
The bad:
Due to their pricing model lower volume users or those with mostly small transactions might end up paying more than they would elsewhere.
Fattmerchant only offers a free virtual terminal with the two higher priced plans and a free EMV terminal only on their most expensive plan.
How it works:
While Fattmerchant isn’t a startup, you may have heard of them already because they tend to act like one. Instead of pumping money into ringing business’s phone lines or knocking on doors, they focus on marketing their positive image through social media and online content. It’s a much more pleasant experience than getting harassed by some of the competition.
There’s a reason why Fattmerchant isn’t so pushy, even if it’s relatively new – they believe in what they do. Subtle, but a powerful difference. You can give them a call without worrying about having sales pushed on you, instead they are happy to give you any information you’re looking for without trying to trick you into signing on the dotted line.
Keeping with the friendly theme, they don’t require any contracts at all. Decide you don’t really like them? No problem, there’s no early termination fee – feel free to walk away, there’s no penalty. There’s also no statement fees, PCI compliance fees, batch fees or IRS reporting fees.
Another way Fattmerchant stands out from the crowd is through their tech support. They offer live chat during business hours and offer a promise that you will always have someone to help you on a 24/7 support line. If you only have a quick question, why not reach out on social media? Fattmerchant is very active on both Facebook and Twitter, and are usually very quick to respond to questions on both platforms.
They back up their friendly demeanor with lots of services you can order. In addition to standard card processing, they offer pre-authorization to check if a customer is good for a payment, ACH e-check processing, online reporting and analytics, mobile processing and more. There’s an API available to integrate fattMerchant with your favorite tools but it might not even be necessary. They already have a list of integration partners including Authorize.net, QuickBooks, Verifone and more. You can find a list on their website of everyone they integrate with.
The only real downside to Fattmerchant is that their packages don’t offer as many add-ons as other plans. What if you need both a mobile reader for conventions and a card terminal for your store front? With a lot of the competition, you could simply mix-and-match plans. It’s not quite as easy with Fattmerchant, you’d have to go with the more expensive plan and then add on the additional reader, even if you don’t need the additional benefits of the higher priced plan.
Keep in mind fattMerchant is a relatively new company, so you won’t find many reviews of their products online. So far the indications are good, there’s a decent amount of positive reviews on FaceBook but they lack a true track record to look at.
Fattmerchant offers three separate plans, the first one is their ‘Coin’ plan, it’s meant for businesses with less volume or those interested in mobile payments from your phone. It has a monthly fee of $69 and will cost you 25¢ per transaction on top of interchange fees. It’s billed as ‘bring your own terminal’ because it’s focused more on mobile devices.
The second option is the ‘Stacks’ plan, it’s intended for ecommerce businesses. Stacks comes with an advanced payment gateway, billed as a ‘virtual terminal’ that allows you to run a virtual business with features like shopping carts, coupon codes, storing customer data and more. This plan will set you back $79 a month and costs 15¢ per transaction on top of interchange fees.
Last up is the ‘Grand’ plan, it’s focused towards high volume clients or retail storefronts. Grand includes a completely free EMV terminal that comes equipped with NFC technology, including apple pay as well as a free mobile reader. Grand costs $99 a month and 8¢ per transaction on top of interchange fees.
Although it’s not advertised, you can give them a call to see if they can set up a custom plan for you. You might want to bring a quote from a competitor to the table for negotiating power.
Pricing models like this haven’t been around for a long time but they’ve stirred up quite a bit of suspicion. Let’s say you’re on the basic Coin plan and you have 100 transactions per month. Fattmerchant is only going to see $69 dollars for the monthly fee and $25 in transaction fees, that’s not sustainable right?
That’s not quite the whole story, while yes Fattmerchant is missing out on some money on the table, they explained that the model is scalable, it’s not meant to scalp the customers. In addition, they’re backed by Vantiv so all risk is averted.
Fattmerchant is definitely worth a look, they have wonderful support, semi-transparent pricing and their rates are hard to beat, especially if you have a high-volume business.
For complete rankings of all credit card processors, go here.
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