The Never Ending Credit Card Saga

Dear Sonn(en)tag Readers,

My wife, Ursula, works hard each week to bring you a German flavor of news on this side of the pond. To help this project pay for itself, she asked me to set up a way to accept donations and advertising payments.

On our local bank’s recommendation, we signed up with North American Bancard. Their salesman visited, we signed the papers, and we thought we were all set.

Then the headaches began. Despite Ursula having had an account for years at the very bank that recommended them, Bancard questioned whether she was “real” and was skeptical about her green card. She has a Social Security number—what’s the problem? We should have walked away then, but we were assured it was just a clerical error. After six weeks she finally processed her first credit-card transaction. (Meanwhile, fees were deducted from day one.)

Two weeks ago Ursula sent a Labor Day message asking readers to support the newsletter. A reader wrote that her donation wouldn’t go through. I tried and got the same error after submitting the form.

We called the Bancard salesman: “We’re sorry—we’ll fix it right away.” Or not. Evidently, Ursula hadn’t answered a questionnaire from their compliance partner (PMI); the email had landed in her spam folder. She answered the questions, and we were told everything was good to go. I tested—success. Ursula sent another email— Well it almost worked. The system accepted card details but never charged the card.

After five months of fees for a service that never worked reliably, we gave up. If they were going to block payments, you’d think they would stop charging us—or at least tell us what was blocked and why.

We’ve now switched to Stripe. I set it up and it works. Unfortunately, this morning’s newsletter went out with the old payment links from an earlier template—that’s on me. The correct links are here:

https://buy.stripe.com/6oU6oA5LR29IdJEgVa1RC00

I apologize for this Credit Card Fiasco. Thank you for supporting Ursula’s work each week.

MfG

John Staud