Direct Connect Merchant Services Review
Overview
Direct Connect Merchant Services is a merchant services firm that was combined with Nova to form Elavon. They are headquartered in Atlanta, GA, and are one of the largest card processing providers in the country. As a result, they are able to provide capital merchant services, but suffer from the fact that so many different companies resell their services, and have a number of complaints against them on the basis of customer service.
Pros
Direct Connect, or Elavon, is large enough to handle their transaction processing in-house. Their merchant service center has the ability to handle billions of transactions. Another advantage of the size of the firm is that they have experience working with all kinds of different businesses, and so likely has experience with businesses in your industry. They’ve also followed trends like the elimination of early termination fees for contracts. Direct Connect/Elavon handles merchant accounts, terminal sales and terminal leases, payment gateways, mobile processing, online reporting, and gift card programs.
Cons
With great size comes great problems. One of the most frequent complaints about Direct Connect merchant services is that their customer service can be non-responsive and hard to use. Moreover, small business merchant services may not get the level of prioritization that they would like. Another issue is that there are a number of businesses selling merchant services that re-sell Direct Connect/Elavon. This means that there are different fee structures depending on how you buy their service, and some of the resellers are better than others, increasing the total merchant services complaints.