Stax Payments Customer Reviews

Sales rep claimed Stax offered NO-contract, month-to-month services with no termination fees. He sent over the application and in small, fine print and one check box to left, there was mention of agreeing to the “Services Agreement”. Which is very much a contract. 50 pages. Fraud

Run!!! After enrollment I processed a few small payments with no issues. At the time of enrollment, advised the sales person that occasionally I get a charge for a larger amount. Received remittance advice from my customer’s 3rd party payment service an presented it for payment. Was advised that it was on hold and additional documentation needed to be provided. I provided requested documentation. They also wanted me to submit additional profile info which I had just provided months earlier. They have processed the charge. They have the funds. Phone calls and emails go unanswered. Should have done my homework better. These people have numerous complaints files with Florida BBB.

FattMerchant (Sid Masso was our onboarding rep) did a good job of breezing us through onboarding and consistently represented their transparency and simplicity in their fee structure.

A short while after we started with them (with several different companies we own) we noticed our rates increasing in the form of fees we were never informed about.

When we initially onboarded with FattMerchant (stax) there was one site to login to actually process cards and see credit card activity with clients, and a separate portal to access to see our statements and fees from FattMerchant (Stax). Note: We did not have access to the site to login to see our fees and bills until several months after onboarding with Stax.

Once we did eventually get access to see our detailing billing, we noticed that we were being charged “Data Analytics/Performance Analytics Fees” as well as “Chargeback Fees” as well as PCI non-compliance fees, despite our never hearing about analytics fees before and despite our being walked through PCI compliance on a lengthy phone call with Stax.

The analytics fees are instituted in an “opt out” manner, wherein at the very bottom of your detailed billing statement, there’s a small one-line notice that they will start billing that fee and providing that “service” unless you opt out. As I mention, we didn’t even have access to see these detailed bills until months after onboarding. And even if we did, there was ZERO explanation of the imposition of additional opt-out fees like this at the outset.

As to the chargeback fees — FattMerchant said these were supposedly charged to us in error and would be refunded. Again, no mention of these at all in our contract or during onboarding. How many clients don’t catch these fees?

As to PCI compliance, we spent more than an hour on a phone call with Larissa Poidmani with Stax and walked through each question. The questions that we weren’t comfortable answering yes to, we were instructed to mark that it did not apply. At the conclusion, Larissa with Stax confirmed our satisfactory PCI compliance. Then we got billed for noncompliance anyway. We’ve gone back through and re-done the PCI compliance repeatedly and still get billed for it periodically.

Upon complaining about these fees, we engaged in a LONG email back and forth with seven different parties from FattMerchant/Stax. The initial response about the opt-out fees is that they were explained in our contract. That was not true, there was no mention of them. Then the next level of support eventually just said that Stax had employees to pay and had to have a way to generate additional revenue. Finally, we ended up with Samantha Karpovck and then Nick Wilson (the highest person we reached) and Nick eventually offered a partial refund of these fees and then just stonewalled and stopped responding to us.

Nobody ever acknowledged the suspect nature of the imposition of thes fees. Stax has a reasonable pricing model based upon what they advertise as their fee structure. BUT, they have additional fees they will institute in an opt-out manner, with essentially ZERO notice, and they won’t tell you about these. This is deceptive, especially for an entity that advertises as being simple, straightforward, and transparent.

BUYER BEWARE

They are a Terrible Company. Once you end the Service they keep Billing you.

AMEN to lowering the rating. The lack of ability to provide detailed statements is what initially prompted us to discover thousands in additional fees we were being charged by FattMerchant/Stax. I couldn’t understand how with our previous provider we got detailed statements of every fee, interchange rate, etc. but with FattMerchant/Stax they simply say they can’t provide this.

I left a detailed review of our experience here: https://www.trustpilot.com/submitted/review?correlationid=5761d94f-d13b-4b5f-920a-4e729439f56c

Not sure if outside links are allowed, but I can provide emails, documentation, bills, etc. detailing our unfortunate experience with FattMerchant/Stax. Really disappointing.

Beware: We signed up and never received our terminals. However, was being charged monthly fee of $209. We tried to cancel and ask for refund but the refused to refund. Eventually, we got more terminals but we called to return them and was told that I would receive return shipping labels in an email. Never received that either. I thought we could get this resolved but we were ignored and monthly drafts just piled up to upwards of $2900.00. We just had to stop payment on the drafts to our account. Probably going to seek legal advice. Never once used terminal, never once used service, never once received any cancellation notice from them even though I cancelled. I think it is illegal to charge for services/goods never received or used.

Fattmerchant has been really inconsistent and ultimately we chose to leave them for Dharma after several bad customer service experiences. For us Fattmerchant could never manage the most base level customer service actions- like updating a bank account – something that should be super easy was met with inaction, mistakes, and delays so we almost left them a month into signing up but we liked the interface and figured it was a bump. However a year later and we received a threatening letter from WorldPay the merchant services because Fattmerchant failed to update a 3d cart storefront we were setting up and never could once Covid caused layoffs so we cancelled it- but low and behold we found out from a collections person that Fattmerchant had created a completely separate MID for our storefront, failed to update the bank account to it and then when we closed the storefront we never built they forgot to tell World Pay that too so monthly charges accumulated for over a year that we never were told about. World Pay said Fattmerchant had access to the billing breakdowns and could not explain how not even the account manager assigned to us knew anything about charges accumulating. But Fattmerchant blew it and when we found out and reached out- we asked for a supervisor to our account manager to contact us and they never did.

Our account manager even assured us in writing that upper management was aware and she could not explain why they were not reaching out to resolve this. We had a collections reported to our credit because of the incompetence of Fattmerchant to simply update our account information which they had confirmed in writing repeatedly they had done when they had not.

I am disgusted with them. They have a good interface but when it counted Fattmerchant was terrible. No one took responsibility. No one helped. And worse, they even tried to suggest it was our fault for “not completing a PCI compliance” but I contacted World Pay and challenged that and they said it had nothing to do with PCI and everything to do with Fattmerchant not updating our account so yeah, in our experience, Fattmerchant aka Stax, sucks.