Chase Paymentech Won’t Honour Authorized $28 Debit Transaction

I originally wrote this for a different blog, but as it concerns our Christian bookstore, I thought I’d share it here as well.

Although the original purpose of this blog was a space for me to vent the various injustices I felt I suffered as a consumer, we’re also small business owners ourselves, and as such we’re at the mercy of bigger businesses, in this case a mega-corporation.

As such we process sales, taking debit, VISA and MasterCard transactions on a daily basis process through a company whose legal name is, I believe, Chase Paymentech Debit Solutions.

Back in June, when our employee rang off for the night, she noticed something was wrong. One of the transactions, just under $28, even though it was clearly authorized, did not appear in the final tally of sales. It just vanished. And the next day, our bank deposit was short that same amount. But we didn’t know all this right away.

We noticed the error on July 7th as part of our monthly sales reconciliation, and notified our point-of-sale provider, Chase Paymentech, a division of Chase bank. A seemingly helpful guy who gave his name as David said that the sale had gone through on the customer’s end — the authorization number was provided by that customer’s bank — but the problem was on their end, and they would track it down and fix it within a month.

But we never heard back, and more than a month had passed. Sending them an email is difficult because you have to use an encrypted network, and our password was in a computer that seized a few days previous.

But my wife persisted and on August 31st we got a notice from them saying they had shut the whole investigation down a week later, on July 14th, and never told us. Their note basically had the attitude, ‘tough luck,’ and because ‘we’re bigger than you,’ we can declare this as ‘not our problem.’ They used different words, of course.

They really were saying that as far as they were concerned, the sale didn’t exist, but then they added in an ‘oh, by the way’ sort of manner, “the sale was MasterCard not VISA.” In other words, we can find no record of this sale, but it was MasterCard.

Furthermore, it wasn’t either. I have the transaction receipt. It was a debit transaction. It says so right on it. And they had received a scan of that.

Did they investigate it at all?

At this point they’ve worn us out.

In our type of work, $28 is a large amount. It makes a difference. More to the point, I realized I don’t want to live in a world where people get away with this sort of thing. And short-term, I definitely don’t want them as my point-of-sale provider anymore.

But on their end, $28 wouldn’t have bankrupted them.

The End of Small Business Marketing on Facebook

This was posted on November 27th at The Wall Street Journal, but not everyone is aware:

…[S]mall-business owners… will soon get less benefit from the unpaid marketing pitches they post on Facebook. That’s because, as of mid-January, the social network will intensify its efforts to filter out unpaid promotional material in user news feeds that businesses have posted as status updates.

The change will make it more difficult for entrepreneurs… to reach fans of their Facebook pages with marketing posts that aren’t paid advertising.

Businesses that post free marketing pitches or reuse content from existing ads will suffer “a significant decrease in distribution,” Facebook warned in a post earlier this month announcing the coming change…

…More than 80% of small companies using social media to promote their businesses list Facebook as their top marketing tool, followed by LinkedIn and Twitter, according to a recent survey of 2,292 small businesses by Webs, a digital services division of Vistaprint. The top three reasons owners cited for creating a Facebook page were customer acquisition, building a network of followers and increasing brand awareness, according to the survey.

Dan Levy, Facebook’s vice president of small business, says that Facebook’s paid-advertising options have become more effective recently and that companies should view Facebook as a tool to “help them grow their businesses, not a niche social solution to getting more reach or to make a post go viral.”

He says he has “a lot of empathy” for business owners who “are feeling this evolution” in the reduction of what he describes as organic reach. But, he says, organic reach is only one of several reasons companies benefit from having a presence on Facebook. Last month, there were more than one billion visits to Facebook pages directly. “Having a presence where you can be discovered still has a ton of value,” he says…

This is a small part of the entire article, click here to read at WSJ.

Our own store has watched penetration of individual posts drop to less than 20%, and more than half of our posts are community events or links to author/artist information. That doesn’t seem to affect whether anyone gets to see what we post, but we’re determined to keep adding new content daily.

Hey Facebook, it was fun while it lasted; but stores like ours just can’t afford to pay the price.