Clearent Review

Too pricey! They have a very confusing statement which "hides" fee from you. There are too many merchant service providers out there to consider this one.

I found Clearent to be a fantastic company. I saved a lot of money and still got my deposits the next day. Would absolutely recommend in the future.

Horrible and stressful experience. They will get you into a 3 year contract without telling you. They will charge you $400 if you want to change provider. They will hold your money for months if they “think” that some of your transactions pose a risk for them. The will charge you tons of compliance and “minimum” fees, which will sum up in hundreds $$ at the end of every month. Just avoid! There are many more modern services, like PayPal, Shopify, Stripe, Square and more. Clearent doesn’t fit into a modern commerce world and needs to be gone!

Terrible support, very disorganized with regards to PCI compliance support. They hire a third party for this. Their service doesn't work on most major modern web browsers. Chat support is useless and cannot view screenshots. Shockingly bad technology and support.

I switched to Clearent thinking it would save me money. My first bill was higher than the quote. The succeeding bills were about 2x what I was quoted. Their customer service sucks. It's not 24/7 as advertised. Good luck getting a hold of them!

I recently had a terribly negative experience with clearent processing. I have a second business which is conducted almost exclusively online my customers typically pay via credit card. I recently processed a sale which was a high dollar item, clearent flagged the transaction and held the funds. There was no complaint by the buyer, no flag from his bank. Clearent flagged the transaction. When I charged the buyer I cautioned he may need to contact his credit card company to have the amount approved, which he did. My complaint is that after providing all the requested information I don't have the funds for the merchandise. Typically when credit card transactions are processed, provided I charge the cc by 5pm, I receive the funds the following business day at 12am. I provided clearent all requested information at 12:41pm Friday 7/28. The buyer’s cc was charged 7/25. I'm told I will not receive the funds till Thursday 8/3. The buyer received his merchandise Friday 7/28. Clearent is withholding funds for over a week after I provided the requested information, no complaint was raised by the buyer or the buyer's cc company. This is unacceptable business practice. I also had the pleasure of two of their risk customer service representatives raising their voice with me while attempting to get details and clarification regarding the transaction. Why do I pay for this service not to mention such unprofessional customer service?

Clearent is a large independent sales organization (ISO) that relies heavily on smaller ISOs, banks, and financial institutions to resell its processing services. Oddly enough, Clearent’s logo still often appears on clients’ statements even when one of its resellers is responsible for sourcing and servicing an account. For this reason, it’s difficult to judge Clearent’s service and pricing because it’s often not responsible for either on the majority of statements and comments we’ve seen pertaining to Clearent. There are providers in CardFellow’s marketplace that use Clearent’s services. For this reason, CardFellow has had to indirectly deal with Clearent on occasion to request interchange downgrade reports (through the member ISO) to diagnose the reasons why a client’s transactions were downgrading. In such cases, Clearent often seems unconcerned or unwilling to provide downgrade information to help its clients, which is quite frustrating. The process of requesting and receiving interchange downgrade information is very easy with most other providers.