The BBC’s Working Lunch programme yesterday had a feature about a viewer who was charged an extra fee by his credit card company for paying via Nochex. The £3 fee was for a “cash advance” on the card. A number of sellers on the Nochex forums have confirmed that they too are receiving complaints from customers who were not warned about this cash advance fee. Some of the affected cards may be Capital One, GM, MBNA, Mint, Sainsbury’s and Tesco.
There is some suggestion that the sudden rush of problems is due to the way that Nochex payments are coded by card issuers: Nochex themselves recommend that if you have been charged, you contact your card issuer and request the charge be cancelled, as the transaction was an “internet purchase”, not a “cash advance”. Nochex support said today:
It may be that this is being used by a handful of credit card issuers as a way of creating an additional income stream for the banks. It should be stressed that the vast majority of main stream card issuers do not charge such a fee and most customers should not by affected by these bank charges.
Nochex have now updated their payment pages to warn that “some” card issuers may charge a fee. Though this is better than nothing, it does not help the buyer who, in the middle of purchasing, has to decide whether to risk it or not. It certainly doesn’t reassure the seller who relies on Nochex to receive payments, and now has to choose between trying to push all buyers back to Paypal, or dealing with irate emails from those who have been charged by their banks. Many sellers will be thinking long and hard now about the viability of their Nochex accounts, and whether a move to a merchant banking account might be in their longer-term interests.
The closest thing that Paypal UK has to a competitor, Nochex process online payments via debit and credit card; they’re particularly popular with small website operators, as they have a low-cost merchant account which will process any debit or credit card, even from buyers who are not members of the service. Their survival, however, may rely on resolving this latest crisis.
9 Responses
This is yet another nail in Nochex coffin.
Nochex realises the game is over and has even begun charging users who have not used their accounts for some time – sometimes closing accounts and taking the whole outstanding balance without even informing the account holder.
Charges for domant accounts was specified in the user agreement you signed when you joined Nochex, Nick.
All the nails must have rusted Nick!
Here at Nochex we are continuing to increase our market share as many merchants realise that PayPal and the new Google checkout is not the only option for small businesses. By offering our merchants a competitive and affordable UK based payment solution and providing friendly support that small businesses need – we can provide a service that the big guns cannot provide.
Sure, we have had a short term problem recently, but we have managed to address and rectify the issue promptly. We have many exciting new services and updates to roll out soon that will create a stir among our competitors – the game is not over at all.
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I have also been stung by the Nochex scam of locking customers out of their accounts (without warning) due to inactivity. Nochex then take any funds still in the ccount for themselves. There is no way to communicate with NOCHEX, all helpline numbers have been removed. You are left with no where to turn and your money ‘stolen’ without warning by teh company you trusted. They are not regulated as they should be by FSA so we poor customers have no where to turn. Try small claims, you can apply for the money taken to be returned, loss of business and also any costs incurred by teh small claims process. Issue the summons to the following guy at NOCHEX:
[Personal name removed]
Company Secretary
103 Clarendon Road
Leeds
LS2 9DF
See how they like a taste of their own medicine !
DO NOT USE NOCHEX!
1. They will freeze your account for no reason.
2. Their customer service is total rubbish.
3. They do not even know who they are talking to when they email you, you are just a ‘thing’
4. They will take your money and run.
5. Nochex also own the domain http://www.nochexsucks.com (it points to their forums, which they have closed down)
Why would a legit company do all those things above? Well they are either trying to build a reputation like their competitor or they are just a bunch of …
DO NOT USE NOCHEX!
Sorry you’ve had problems, Liam, but re. #5, I think any sensible company would buy up the “…sucks.com” domain name. In fact, I think I’d better go get tamebaysucks.com now 😆
Yesterday I started looking for a PHBXXXX application and payment processor to enable us to sell a few mugs on a website. Because I wanted to keep tabs on sales, and not sell mugs we don’t have and because I’m not the best organised of people and loose emails I wanted to store the orders in a Mysql database.
After a bit of searching I discovered no simple application doing what I wanted, so I decided to write the few lines of code I needed.
THen I looked for a payment processor. OK paypal is there but I like British and NoChex seemed to fit the bill. Their documentation was almost useless, but eventually I worked out what to do to receive the messages, finally I had a file to process transactions that was working, I then wrote the html form, and started to sign up for an account.
…. and given the tackyness of their website … as if they really didn’t care …. before I entered my bank details, I thought I should do one last google search “NOCHEX SCAM”, thank god!
It is bad enough trying to sell mugs knowing you’ll probably loose money and end up giving them away to all your friends, but to realise that even the small amount of money you do take in will be stolen by nochex when they lock you out and steal it all makes me vomit.
I did sign up with NOCHEX, just to check out my code … my code works fine, but the Nochex site doesn’t respond to my tag and unless I give them money they won’t enable the facility.
And to cap it all, there is no facility to close accounts! Nor any facility to remove credit card details, nor any facility to remove bank account information.
It’s all in the name NO-check …. the only people signing up with them can’t be aware that they have an indefinite contract whereby if anytime the account is inactive (perhaps a week’s holiday?) they can charge £5.
Perhaps a bet name would be: SURECON.com!
Biddy – are you trying to justify the £5 per quarter charge for account inactivity? I can’t see how anyone can argue this is anything but robbery, whether it is in the T&Cs or not. This is clearly a tool for NOCHEX to be able to legitimise stripping inactive accounts of the funds.
I’m not trying to justify it; I’m saying that it was in the user agreement when you signed up. I thought that was what I said; perhaps I and Nochex should have been clearer 🙄