Of Banks and E-Commerce
By Mr.e

Hey! Want to tear a strip off a bank. Ok so this strip is rather small in terms of financial dealing and the bank is a big one (aren’t they all), but it’s a strip nevertheless.

Late last year, my significant other and myself found ourselves in the position to position a unique product we developed on the world wide web. With some very generous and creative web design help from a friendly wizard, we launched a very professional looking website.

Having a website was a fine thing. Now we had a tool to show our wares to anyone interested in visiting our URL (web address).

In short order we realized that we needed to get a grip on that e-commerce thing we’d been hearing so much to-do about, but didn’t fully comprehend.

We scoured the web and conducted numerous searches in our quest to find an appropriate small business e-com solution; one that would match our needs. All we kept coming up with were mega US companies dealing with biggish retail ventures.

Queries e-mailed to these operations revealed that they didn’t deal with the particular bank we’d chosen to set up our business accounts with. And at this stage we were in no mood to switch.

So we asked our bank (one of Canada’s leading profiteers) if they had any ideas or e-com solutions for our small online business. This banking establishment replied with a list of four (third party) e-com solution providers they dealt with; after we paid a hefty security deposit for the privilege of being a Visa Merchant. Hmm …

Upon researching the choices we opted for a Canadian company and signed up. We paid another fee, put together a product list, and created an online order form. Voila: our customers could make their purchases online. That pleased us a great deal.

We were pleased to discover that we were now enable to accept not only Visa but also Master Card, Amex and Diners Card. Four cards for a substantially lower cost than the fee demanded by our ‘oh-so-helpful’ bank branch.

Well, lets not be fooled by the term helpful. The bank definitely was not. Sure, they helped themselves to our money by way of the security deposit. They in no way went out of their way or cared to explain the intricacies of providing this kind of service.

It took a little while to discover that perhaps we didn’t need that Visa Merchant status after all in order to sell online. After a few inquiries we confirmed this suspicion and cancelled that account with our bank. That’s when we found out how disjointed the banks departments really are. You know the one about the right hand not knowing what the left one is doing. Big time condition at this bank.

After some departmental Ping-Pong we got our money back, lost some interest and all of our trust or respect for this institution.

Ok, so we realize that the bank we chose didn’t have a good grasp on how to provide e-service to its clients. I hope they do now, because if we were to go through this again, we would be damned sure that a bank knew what it was talking about before making any more decisions like this.

Bottom line, if you are interested in going online with your product, contact a reliable third party e-com service provider and try to cut the bank out of it. I’m sick of them skimming off too much ‘profit’ while decreasing the quality of even basic services.

Trying to get good information from our bank on this was like pulling teeth or suffering through a dental procedure you don’t really need.