Complaint Review: GoDaddy.com

GoDaddy.com charges a $59.95 Merchant Account Fee that they claim is an application fee to a third party vendor, Innovative Merchant Services; however, in speaking with Innovative Merchant Services, they indicated that GoDaddy.com often lies to customers indicating that they cannot return the Merchant Account Fee because the fee is paid to a third party company. In essence, GoDaddy keeps the Merchant Account Fee.

In our case, we are a lawfirm that wanted to process credit cards and that is all we wanted through our site. Three customer service representatives at GoDaddy told us that the GoDaddy Merchant Account was what we needed. They also sold us two other services accompanying the Merchant Account totaling almost $250.00. In the end, when we could not get the account set up, we spoke with a fourth customer service representative who finally came clean that the GoDaddy Merchant Account is more of an Amazon.com set us and has nothing to do with processing credit cards for professionals.

After all of the above, we were told repeatedly that the Merchant Account Fee could not be refunded because it goes to a third party. When we confirmed with Innovative Merchant Services that they do not charge an application fee, GoDaddy had no response except that the fee is non-refundable even if they mislead a customer about their service.

Certainly, we are but one customer; however, of the thousands of people that pay for the Merchant Account, find out it is not for them and cancel the service, the $60 per customer is 100% gravy for GoDaddy and there is no incentive for their customer Service Representatives to be honest about whether the service is right for a customer. Since the fee is non-refundable no matter what, there is more incentive for a GoDaddy customer service representative to lie to sign you up for the service even if, as in our case, they know that the service will never work for the customer.

Matt and Michele
Los Alamitos, California
U.S.A.