BlueSnap is a popular eCommerce-centric payment provider or platform featuring monthly contracts without any early termination fees. It is primarily an eCommerce-centric company. The company has its headquarters in Waltham in Massachusetts. It is a leading merchant service provider that specializes in the delivery of online processing solutions for a number of e-commerce businesses.
In 2001, the company was created with the name Plimus. Later on, in 2011, the company was acquired by Great Hill Partners. Again, in 2013, the company was rebranded. It had to face some negative publicity for the same after it had to undergo a class-action lawsuit that was filed against the company.
An Overview of BlueSnap
BlueSnap is a payment processing solution that offers organizations -especially B2B and B2C entities, across the globe with improved ways to accept payments. It can assist your organization to fully expand its respective operations by enabling you to accept payments from both international and local customers.
The system is available with the all-in-one payment application that allows your business to enjoy a massive global network of securing banks. This implies that you get access to the widest range of payment conversion rates. It is also available with the advanced billing engine to create accurate invoices for the subscribers and clients all around the world.
It is possible to integrate BlueSnap with several platforms as well as shopping carts to help with instant payment processing. Some of the instances of such platforms can be integrated are Alipay, Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal. The platform also offers access to the built-in virtual terminal for supporting all variants of consoles. In turns, this allows BlueSnap to ensure transaction support over smartphones.
Top Benefits of BlueSnap
Some of the main benefits of BlueSnap are:
- All-round Payment Solution: BlueSnap is a great payment gateway irrespective of the type of clients your business will have access to different types of transactions. Whether it is the general public or with other types of businesses, the system will assist your organization to grow effectively. It is well-equipped with dedicated tools such that it will not matter if you are leveraging subscriptions, services, physical goods, or SaaS products. Whatever services or products you are offering, you can be assured of selling with the best-in-class conversions.
- Multiple Payment Methods: One of the major characteristics of BlueSnap is that it features a combination of payment gateway, payment processor, and merchant accounts in a single platform. This allows the system to offer your business an abundance of options as far as payment choices are concerned. You can look forward to accepting payments from domestic as well as international clients, with the help of credit cards through online gateways, or from other types of payment platforms that the respective system is capable of integrating with -including Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Google Pay, and Apple Pay.
- Advanced Payment Analytics: BlueSnap developers understand the importance of analytics for all businesses out there. This is why the entire team is equipped with an array of advanced payment analytics tools that will help in improving business transparency as well as insights. The system is able to generate real-time, affiliate, and instant revenue and sales reports and much more.
- Secure Platform: BlueSnap has been developed towards protecting its users from fraudulent transactions. As such, the defined set of features include strict security protocols along with a myriad of tools. These features enable its users to look out for fraudulent payments while minimizing the instances by as much as 80 percent.
Products & Services of BlueSnap
The product lineup of BlueSnap is extensive. Merchants will come across almost any feature that they require towards running a successful business. Some of the advanced offerings of BlueSnap include:
- Merchant Accounts: BlueSnap does not serve to be a direct processor. Rather, it is known to partner with multiple backend processors towards providing merchant account to the respective customers. Some of the leading partners of BlueSnap are FIS Worldpay, First Data (Fiserv), and so more.
- Integrated Payments Platform: The primary product of BlueSnap is the All-in-One payment platform of the service provider. The platform makes use of a dedicated payment gateway that integrates effectively with both the physical form of credit card processing hardware and the business website. It is capable of accepting more than 100 types of payments across 100 currencies. Therefore, it is an ideal solution for international merchants. Some of the common types of payments are PayPal, all types of major credit cards, and even ACH payments through wire transfer or e-check.
- Mobile credit card terminals: BlueSnap has managed to expand itself from the standard e-commerce platform. Now, it is capable of offering support for retail-based merchants as well. In the present scenario, only Clover Go and Clover Flex are advertised on the website of the company. However, some other Clover terminals can be supported as well.
- Virtual terminals; The proprietary virtual terminal of BlueSnap enables you to accept orders that are placed through mail, telephone, email, or fax. All of these can be implemented without using a website. It is also possible to send out requests or invoices for payment with the help of dedicated payment links. This allows your customers to ensure instant payments through debit or credit card, wire transfer, or ACH.
- Shopping Cart Integration: The all-in-one payment platform also helps in integrating with a comprehensive range of leading online shopping carts -like Magento, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and so more.
- Recurring Billing: The payment gateway of BlueSnap supports the notion of recurring billing while including features like the account updater and full-scale customization. The account updater is responsible for updating the payment information of the customers when the card on the file will expire.
- Developer Tools: If you would like to personalize the interface, the Developer Hub of BlueSnap offers you access to documentation and APIs to customize features like the Account Updater and hosted payment pages.
BlueSnap Pricing and Rates
Like most other providers that offer access to payment gateway and credit card processing services as a grouped product. BlueSnap offers the option of choosing between pricing plans available as:
- Customized Pricing: For large-scale business, there is the presence of a customized pricing option. It makes use of tiered, flat-rate, or interchange-plus pricing feature. There is the offering of special discounted rates with this plan along with Level 2-3 processing for ensuring B2B transactions. Still, BlueSnap does not offer additional details. Therefore, you are expected to reach out to the sales department for receiving the customized quote.
- Quick Start Pricing: Meant for small businesses, the plan aims at offering a flat processing rate of around 2.9 percent along with $.30 for every transaction for merchants based in the United States. Billing is based on the pay-as-you-go basis without any early termination fee or long-term contract. The plan is regarded as the best for small-scale businesses or startups without any former processing history.
During the past, BlueSnap did not charge the annual or account setup fee. Also, there was not any presence of a monthly minimum with the account. The company used to charge a maintenance fee of $75 in terms of monthly account maintenance. This was meant for merchants who used to process less than $2,500 every month. However, this fee appeared immensely unpopular with merchants. While the overall fees have been dropped, it is strongly recommended to review the contract documents properly before you sign up for the account. All the fees -including the incidental fees, are expected to be disclosed somewhere in the contract print.
BlueSnap Complaints
There are around 50 negative reviews about BlueSnap on the net. Most of these reviews claim that the company is a rip-off or a scam. There have been reports of some older reviews referred to Plimus instead of BlueSnap. However, BlueSnap has managed to gather its own level of complaints in the past several years. Most users complaint about the company that it has scammed them by selling illegitimate products or services. However, there are complaints related to poor account support, hidden fees, and the overall confusion with respect to the real name of the company.
Fines and Lawsuits of BlueSnap
A lawsuit was fined By Kimberly Yordy in January 2012. The lawsuit had alleged that Plimus -the previous brand of the company, had intentionally offered its affiliates with false reviews and testimonials. These testimonials were aimed at deceiving customers into buying access to illegal channels for the download of digital content.
The case, however, was denied class-action status during October in 2013. The lawsuit has been dismissed. Still, Plimus went ahead with changing its name to BlueSnap by the given period.
