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A Brief History of QuickBooks Credit Card Processing
No doubt about it. Intuit, makers of QuickBooks, has certainly cornered the market in accounting for small business. And with good reason; QuickBooks is an excellent accounting product.
Processing credit cards (along with payroll, online banking, and so on) directly from the software interface was a natural extention of the QB product. The powers at Intuit no doubt had this in mind when they acquired a small California processor called Innovative Merchant Solutions (IMS) a few years ago. The purpose of this acquisition was to provide credit card processing capability for the captive customers of the popular QuickBooks accounting software. It is clear to most observers that the marketing strategy was to force QuickBooks customers who wanted to process credit cards through the software to use their service, Innovative, or none at all, a practice called proprietary marketing for lack of a better term. And it worked. For a long time; if you wanted to process credit cards via your QB software, Innovative Merchant Solutions was a take-it-or-leave it proposition. Welcome to the world of hard-ball marketing.
Because all proprietary solutions by definition seek to 'box in' customers by minimizing or eliminating their alternatives and therefore their competitive leverage, consumers paid a heavy price for the 'privilege' of using the QB merchant service option. Indeed, as of today, the QuickBooks website quotes an astonishingly high $19.95 monthly fee for QuickBooks Merchant Services via IMS, plus an equally punishing 2.44% for mid-qualified, and 3.54% for non-qualified transactions.
Thankfully, relief has arrived in recent years. An impressive array of dependable and well-priced QuickBooks 'plug-ins' have arrived on the market. Most very accurately mimic the proprietary in-house IMS plug-in in all respects, and many actually exceed the IMS offering in functionality-all at a fraction of the cost of the in-house product. The product described herein is one of the better plug-ins we have come across, developed by a company called Charge Anywhere. Of all the options on the market, it is the one we choose to market and recommend to our merchants.
Incidentally, this sort of 'changing of the guard' from a dominant provider to alternates is nothing new. Those of you who were around back in the early 1980's remember when PC computers first appeared on the market. Back then, IBM was the industry standard and the King of the Hill. If you wanted a computer,you bought an IBM and paid what the price tag said, or you did without. Pretty much the same situation QB Merchant Services has enjoyed for years up until now.
Eventually, what were once dismissed as "clones' began to appear on the market-Compaq, Dell, Gateways-initially thought of as second-rate pretenders to the 'real' thing from IBM. But as time went on, the forces of competition took over. Computers got bigger and better, prices dropped, and the former 'pretenders' became the mainstays of the industry. Good for consumers. Bad for the Intuit/QuickBooks and IBM's of the world.
That's the way it works. QuickBooks will no doubt remain dominant accounting software providers for a long time because accounting is their turf. But with the advent of high quality processing plug-ins, it appears the better choices for credit card processing solutions will return primarily where it belongs in the domain of t hose who specialize in that specific industry. And for consumers, that is very good news.
