Credit Card Processor (Merchant Services) BBMS

CHRISTA HART

Has anyone tried using a different merchant servicer than BBMS for Altru? If so can you share your experience? Issues?

Jacob Orand

We have used a third party terminals for almost 8 years. We are now just testing out the new EMV E2EE Verifone terminal offered by BBMS. So far so good with BBMS. Time will tell.

Our stand alone third party terminals worked fine. And we loved that they had a gift card program we could use too! One of the major problems was human error. You would have to manually punch in the amount. Unfortunately, our staff would sometimes make costly mistakes when punching it in. Even worse, they would complete the sale in Altru but forget to charge it on the CC machine, or vice versa.

I heard and saw HORROR stories of BBMS back in the day. Along with that and them not having EMV/PCI compliance, we stayed with our other solution.

In terms of rates….that's a different story. There are so many gateway fees, processing fees, passthrough fees, interconnect fees, cc fees, etc., it is hard to make an apple to apples comparison. BBMS was able to work with us which made the decision a lot easier.

If we ultimately decide to go with BBMS, we will get rid of our standalone terminals, change processors, and merge our gift card program to another vendor. I doubt we will buy a gift card terminal for each register.

CHRISTA HART

Jacob, thank you very much for your response. Although I was under the impression that I could bring in a third party processor directly into Altru and the transaction would process automatically just as with BBMS. Maybe you do not utilize Altru? As for BBMS, we have not had any issues with them except the higher processing fees. We have had third party vendors analyze our sales numerous times and can save us thousands each year and is the reason we are looking to outsource.

Jacob Orand

We do use Altru. I am fairly confident you cannot bring in another terminal/service. BBMS and Cybersource are the only available options. That would require the Altru API to connect with the device software/hardware. I don't know of any third party vendor that does that.

CHRISTA HART

Oh goodness!! Ok good to know. We certainly don't want to go backwards and slow down cc processing. I will get with my rep to look at bit closer at the functionality of it all. Thank you very much Jacob!