On Thu, Nov 27, 2003 at 02:19:04AM -0500, Russ Goodwin wrote: > Can anyone here offer praise or horror stories on the Echo credit card > processing service? (echo-inc.com) I know a bunch of people have asked > about cc processing and Echo integration here in the past, but I couldn't > find a summary or even an opinion of their service in the archive.
Echo's model looked like a great fit for us in several ways, not the least of which was allowing easy processing of batches. But I could never get past the contract. Practically every item in the contract was counter to the model that an ISP would want to use-- and many of the specific terms were contradictory. When I talked to them about it the response was "oh, we only enforce the ones that apply to you." Which would be fine if you could red-line the ones that didn't, but nope. I just couldn't deal with that. I got plenty of feedback from other ISPs who suggested that I just ignore the terms and work with them anyway, but I didn't. (BTW: this is not unlike a couple of items in the opensrs contract, but at least there were some mitigating factors there.) Echo's reps also had a hard time understanding that charges might vary from month to month, or more importantly, might be unpredictable at the start of a month. They really insisted on a merchandise sort of model, where you have an item with a ticket price and a customer pays that specific price in advance and that's it. That was odd considering that they claimed to deal with a lot of ISPs. It's been a couple of years, so I also would be interested in hearing other feedback. mm
