A piece of advice

This month $24.90 was charged to our bank account from a company with initials that stand for who knows what. In working to establish our business dream, we've signed up with several organizations and had to give banking information that we usually guard very closely. If you start a business, we have one piece of advice: Take meticulous notes.

When we established our website with Ipage, they said we needed to establish accounts with iPayment and Merchant Resource in order to sell T-shirts and accept credit card payments. Before the website was ready, Merchant Resource (or was it iPayment?) had already charged us $19.95, though the charge on our bank account was from "MTOT." In early May we had the $24.90 charge from MTOT.

Once Ipage said we didn't need these firms to sell items on our website and to accept credit card payments (through PayPal), we sent emails and faxes closing our accounts. We found out today that we had forgotten that we opened a "gateway account" with Authorize.net. It is easy to confuse Merchant Resource and Authorize.net. For example, we have emails from Authorize.net that read, "Thank you for choosing Merchant Resource, a recognized leader in the online payments industry." Merchant Resource, they told us today, is a separate "merchant service provider." Or something like that.

We remain confused. If not for the bill in today's mail from iPayment for $24.90, we wouldn't have been certain who took the money from our bank account. And their bill, by the way, was for the original $19.95 plus an additional $4.95 "regulatory fee." We are sure they mentioned that charge in the fine print when we signed up for their service.

When we called to ask for a refund today, the kind lady said the charge was for the previous month. Of course she didn't know that we just signed up with them in early April and never were able to set up credit card payments through them on our PrestaShop website, but that's water under the bridge, right? Besides, our faxes and emails must have gone to iPayment and not to them. Wait a minute, who were we talking to?

Which brings us back to our tip for budding entrepreneurs: take meticulous notes ... and don't sign up with companies for the ability to accept credit card payments until you are absolutely sure you need them.