We’ve already pointed out the trickery of Costco, but there are even more large corporations who build on your existing trust in order to lure you into processing credit cards with them. Today, we want to highlight how Intuit leverages the QuickBooks brand to develop a merchant services business.
As a small business owner, you may be asking, “Won’t QuickBooks just provide me with a quick and easy way to process credit cards?”
Yes, it may have that same soothing color scheme of green and gold.
Yes, it may integrate into your QuickBooks software.
Yes, it may come with a free credit card reader for your mobile phone.
BUT, it will come at a hefty price!
Although Intuit may not pass you off to a third party to process transactions like Costco does, they’re still using the same techniques to overcharge you.
You trust QuickBooks to begin with.
Intuit adds merchant services to the mix.
Intuit now hopes you’ll just process credit cards without thinking about the cost.
They are counting on the borrowed trust (as an existing QuickBooks customer) to get you to sign up without asking too many questions. Our advice…don’t trust QuickBooks or Intuit to process credit card transactions!
Three “Quick” Ways that Intuit Overcharges Small Businesses
After speaking with a number of our own customers and conducting in-depth research of Intuit customer complaints, here are the top three reasons why you shouldn’t go with their merchant accounts.
- Intuit buries the fine print on their pricing.
When you land on their website, they ask you to select a method of processing credit cards. Then, you’re barraged by more all sorts of sales jargon that you’ll need to wade through to find their pricing. Click on the pricing tab, and you’ll notice small numbers next to their rates that lead to footnotes. Go ahead and see how long it takes you to find those footnotes on the page. It took us five minutes of clicking around to finally find them under “important disclosures” at the very bottom of the page. We made it easy for you by capturing a screenshot on the right. Click to see what Intuit is trying to hide. - Intuit is using a tiered pricing structure to overcharge you.
Based on an initial glance, you may think that you’ll pay 1.64% on all swiped transactions and 2.44% on all keyed transactions. Not so fast! Look at the fine print, and you’ll notice that some Non-Qualified Transactions will be charged 3.87% and an additional $.07 each. That’s quite a bit more than what seemed clear on the surface. As a small business, it’s important to note that anywhere from 50% to 80% of your transactions are going to be considered Non-Qualified (rewards and corporate cards) and fall into the 3.87% rate category. Read this minor detail is something Intuit is hoping you won’t see:“All Visa/MC/Discover Network transactions that do not meet the requirements stated above, business cards, foreign cards and transactions that do not meet Visa/MC/Discover Network requirements for the best interchange program will be charged a “Non-Qualified Rate” of 3.87%. Non-Qualified transactions are charged an additional $.07 each.”
- They refocus you on “quick and easy” rather than on transparent and fair.
Intuit has built the QuickBooks business on the values of “quick and easy” which are both great qualities when keeping track of expenses as a small business. This mantra gets repeated over and over in their sales process, but it ultimately masks the fact that the merchant is getting overcharged. Yes, you do want things to be easy, but we also want the pricing to be transparent and fair.
QuickBooks is a wonderful way to keep track of your books, but they don’t want it to be easy to see how much you’re spending on credit card transactions. Don’t be duped by the green and gold that you’ve trusted for years. There are better solutions that don’t include getting overcharged.