Review: Vantage Services Inc.

As those of you who are members of our newsletter will know, I spend much of my time looking for cost-effective ways for non-US merchants to get themselves a merchant account.

Well, in response to this, I was very interested when I noticed the details of a company called Vantage Services.

Vantage Services, or VanServ for short, are based in the US, but promise to be the non-US merchants' saviour.

Various articles promise that this US company could somehow provide others with their own merchant account.

However, bear in mind that virtually every other bank intermediary in the United States of America require details such as Social Security Numbers to validate identification, and also that many country's residents do not have such a thing, I wondered ... is it all as it first appears?

Is this really the gold at the end of the rainbow or yet another poorly put-together let down?

On visiting the website I was put off slightly by the general design which seems very amateurish but decided to continue my examination further.

After all, the possibilities were enormously exciting, and perhaps they just spent all their money and time on things other than graphic design.

However, after examining the terms and conditions of the contract for international merchants it seems that Vantage Services acts only as a third-party processor (ala Clickbank or 2CheckOut).

Unfortunately this isn't made crystal clear by their website and more analysis is required to fully root out this fact. So VanServ, despite insinuations on their website, don't provide non-US merchants with a merchant account.

More amusingly, they also charge a large setup fee, something which is either far lower or waived completely by their competitors. Indeed, it by far the highest setup fee I've ever encountered for a third-party service.

This includes, at the time of writing, $75 per month "account maintenance" fee, $185 to set up the service for you and $260 to actually open the account.

Note that in stark contrast, Clickbank and 2CheckOut do all of this for free, and offer far more in terms of added extras. As a result, I think that for non-US companies, you check out our special gold award article for a US merchant account provider who will deal with international merchants, ask reasonable fees and do provide you with your own merchant I.D.

To read more about them, please click here.

To be fair, Vantage do offer a money-back guarantee though this only applies "prior to the handling of live orders".

Lastly, in terms of customer service I'd say they were below the line of average. Two different emails to Vantage received very different responses. One helpful and interesting though not absolutely clear as to the actual answer to my specific question, the other email rude, patronising and made me feel like Vantage simply didn't have time for me.

You've been warned!