emerchantpay review: Our Worst Nightmare
Summary: emerchantpay failed to capture almost all of our customers’ payments, resulting in thousands of dollars in losses and countless work hours spent contacting customers individually to partially recover these losses. Subsequently, they terminated our agreement without explanation when questioned.
We are Ultimate Gadget Laboratories Kft., a Hungarian company, and our website is UltimateHackingKeyboard.com. When we contacted emerchantpay, we were already using a payment processor that captured most transactions, but approximately 5% of transactions failed, so we were seeking a better alternative.
Upon contact, we received a quick reply from one of their employees, who became our eCommerce Sales Manager. He guided us through the application process and promptly addressed our questions. I thoroughly read their Terms of Service to understand all details.
On 2024-08-17, we began processing payments through them in our webshop, expecting the funds to be captured by emerchantpay and transferred to our bank account.
On 2024-08-27, my assistant Nóra noticed that the funds from webshop orders weren’t credited to our bank accounts. She emailed our manager but received only unhelpful responses.
On 2024-08-28, a customer complained about being unable to pay in our webshop. I observed the nonsensical error message from the emerchantpay WooCommerce plugin stating “Checkout payment error: Argument passed in valid format but makes no sense (e.g. incorrect country code or currency).” I immediately reverted to our previous payment processor and asked the customer to retry the purchase. He declined, resulting in a lost revenue of 611 EUR.
On 2024-09-02, Nóra noticed that webshop order funds weren’t credited to our bank accounts and emailed emerchantpay. They suggested manually capturing transactions via their Genesis merchant dashboard, which proved unintuitive, cumbersome, and extremely time-consuming to use, with an unnecessarily long 158-page user guide.
When attempting to capture payments this way, Nóra encountered the error message “Workflow ReferenceInvalidatedError: authorize timeframe expired?” When we asked for clarification, emerchantpay explained that the default authorization timeframe is 7 days. In other words, we needed to approve every transaction within 7 days of purchase; otherwise, they would be void. Nóra managed to capture only three transactions totaling 593.24 USD and 196.48 EUR. The rest, totaling many thousands of dollars and euros, were void.
This situation is absurd. emerchantpay had numerous opportunities to explain that transactions required explicit capture. They could have informed us during onboarding, when we started processing, or before the captures became void. Instead, we only discovered this when almost every capture was already void. Furthermore, no reasonable payment processor should expect their clients to approve every transaction individually.
I emailed our manager, detailed the situation, and asked him to find a solution. He replied with a courteous, wordy, and completely useless email stating that they can’t capture the transactions and even saying that the 7-day capture timeframe model is in favor of us because this way, we can void the transaction in 7 days when we have no stock or if the product hasn’t reached the consumer. This way, we can avoid fraud reports.
His explanation is unrealistic. Merchants like us don’t offer products for sale when out of stock. In worst-case scenarios, we issue refunds. Additionally, since we sell globally, some shipments take longer than 7 days despite our best efforts, making it counterproductive for captures to become void.
Our manager also said that he was unsure how this misunderstanding occurred. Let me help explain: it’s because emerchantpay failed to communicate it!
On 2024-09-20, emerchantpay emailed us: “With reference to Art. 15.7 (i) of the Terms and Conditions, Version 5, dated the 1st of August 2023 (“T&C”), we hereby officially notify you of our decision to terminate, with immediate effect, the Merchant Service Agreement signed on 31 March 2024 by and between Ultimate Gadget Laboratories Kft., eMerchantPay Ltd and E-Comprocessing.”
When I informed them that I couldn’t locate the referenced clause and inquired about their reasons for termination, they didn’t even bother to respond.
While most affected customers were willing to pay again, we remain thousands of dollars short, some of which we’ll never recover. In our experience, emerchantpay is not only a useless trainwreck; They pose a huge business risk. They failed to fulfill their primary purpose: capturing payments. They offered no solutions or remedies and demonstrated no accountability.
This review was originally published at https://ultimatehackingkeyboard.com/emerchantpay-review-our-worst-nightmare
