Helcim Reviews & Product Details

The site has a good UI and is easy to navigate. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I chose Helcim because their website prominently advertised an average rate of 2.22%, which they position as a key advantage over competitors. My first transaction told a very different story: for a $12,833 charge, the actual effective rate came out to 3.14%. When I raised the issue, Helcim’s response was that the published rates are only “averages,” not actual costs. That disclaimer is buried in the fine print, not clearly presented, and feels intentionally obscured.

On top of the pricing surprise, the onboarding process was unusually painful. Helcim required a full balance sheet, profit and loss statement, and cash flow statement, along with multiple rounds of back-and-forth. For a payments provider claiming simplicity and transparency, this experience was anything but.

Between misleading rate expectations, denial of any remedy, and an unnecessarily burdensome setup process, I cannot recommend Helcim and would advise others to proceed with caution. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We’ve had an excellent experience with Helcim. The platform is intuitive, easy to use, and onboarding has been smooth from start to finish. Their North American–based support team has been incredibly helpful, and we especially appreciate the attention to compliance and security from the risk and safety team — Phillip and Josh have been thorough but always fair. We just completed setup of our second processing account for our newest business, and we’re excited to continue working with Helcim. Highly recommended. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

lakc of tap to pay on the phone for android phones (not a dislike as i know it is soon to come) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It was an easy setup process and the onboarding was great. After that it was a nightmare. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Helcim was the absolute worst payment processor I’ve ever dealt with. I jumped through hoops to get signed up, provided all the documentation they asked for, and finally got approved. I then spent hours setting up my account, integrating it with my business, and preparing to process payments.

After my first successful transaction, everything went downhill fast. Just two days later, I received an email demanding more information and additional steps to continue using their service. It was like they couldn’t get their act together from the start!

While I was trying to comply with their ridiculous demands, they closed my account with no warning. Worse yet, they refunded my client’s payment without my permission, causing massive problems with my accounting and payroll. This kind of unprofessionalism is beyond unacceptable—it’s outright damaging to businesses!

I have never encountered such incompetence and disrespect from any company. Their lack of communication, poor processes, and cavalier attitude toward my business have left me scrambling to fix the mess they caused.

Do yourself a favor and stay FAR away from Helcim. Their competitive pricing means nothing when their service is this disastrous. Save yourself the headache and go with a processor that actually respects its customers and their businesses. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Helcim allows me to do business the way I need to and all of the options for taking payments from customers make it user-friendly for my clients as well. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Thus far, I have no complaints about Helcim. I can conduct business just the way I like. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As a medium-sized healthcare non-profit, their fee rates for us are fantastic. Their "Merchant Experience Agents" always work hard to solve issues but often struggle to come up with working solutions for more complex issues due to what seems to be a lack of communication with the dev teams on how the system works. We had been given two or three solutions on a few different issues, most of which did not work as intended. With that in mind, our use case is different than most small businesses, so the problems we are running into are probably not typical.

All in all, we have found solutions around Helcim's shortcomings thanks to the strengths of our development and IT teams, combined with the quality of Helcim's support team.

Helcim would be a great fit if we were smaller. If your business is like ours, with ten (10) employees or separate locations that will need the ability to run cards and require individual reporting, I strongly advise considering other payment processors unless your company has the skill and time to create workarounds for some of their broken/buggy features. Ultimately though, the long-term savings are worth the short-term trouble and additional workload. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Helcim is not developed for larger businesses to use right out of the box. Some of the more essential features I was told would work during the sales phase before selecting Helcim, turned out to be buggy or non-functional.

Several API features listed in their documentation as live, with examples in their API ref, are non-functional:

1) Requesting "Other Tender" transaction list does not work (known issue, they keep telling me it'll be resolved "the next version update"). This prevents the use of the Helcim App as an all-in-one POS suite if you have more than 10 employees (see reporting issues below)

2) The transaction IDs for their system do not match transaction IDs in the database the API uses (apparently, this is a known issue and is the result of one system using the "old" database/method but has yet to be fixed from what the Helcim rep told me), which prevents transactions from being searched w/o an invoice number

3) Invoice numbers are sometimes reassigned if the first time the transaction was declined (with data still in them) with the virtual terminal, which leads to invoices being associated with two customers (e.g. Bob's card declined and he paid with cash. An hour late, Sue pays with her debit card and is re-assigned Bob's invoice number, except that Bob's name and -$ transaction amount are both visible on the invoice). This preventsw using invoice numbers as a reliable means of customer/transaction identification (note that actual transaction IDs do NOT match up with transaction IDs in the API), a solution given to us when we discovered that the API and terminals do not use the same system for assigning transaction IDs.

Several issues we've experienced can be solved by creating scrollable dropdown lists instead of hard-coding dropdowns to only display ten options:

-The employee field for creating sales reports is hard-coded to display no more than ten employees; if you have more than ten employees, you can only generate employee-specific reports for the first ten you create. This forced us to develop our own sales reporting application in-house, as we have over 20 employees using the system throughout our locations.

-The same goes for "terminals" (the location/Merchant account that a transaction is run through) in the Helcim App, limiting a business to 10 unique "terminal" locations. We needed 14 merchant accounts under our main account to uniquely identify each separate location/department (for accounting and reporting purposes) but ultimately had to make some concessions as the dropdown list to associate a terminal with the app is limited to 10 and does not have a scrollbar.

Also, the Helcim App will routinely fail to display sales reports, even though it shows a "Success!" message and sometimes is "bricked" by updates, with the only fix we have found being to uninstall and reinstall.

Every issue we have had with Helcim has been things that should've been identified/addressed during development or beta, or at least been an issue that their support agents were aware of (such as no way to register terminals 11+ with the app). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Small footprint of terminal; doesn't take up much space. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Desktop app for terminal crashes or freezes up frequently. Must reload it several times a day despite rebooting, keeping app up-to-date, etc. Also don't like merchant fees being taken out every day instead of once a month. Complicates posting daily deposits to QuickBooks. Dashboard is complicated, and online instructions don't address basic functions. The good news is the customer service folks are quite helpful and always pleasant to deal with when needed. Did a bunch of research before switching to Helcim, and it seemed like the best option. Regret that choice now as staff frequently complains about frequent freezes and multiple steps required for each transaction. We needed a very simple credit card processing option, and this is far from simple. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Their customer service people are actually very kind and responsive even if they don't have access to much data or can really do much to really help. I have found that, for the most part, they really do care even if they haven't been able to solve any problems, saying other departments are working on them.

If your business accepts a high percentage of consumer credit or debit cards, or prepaid cards, this may be a good fit.

I would recommend this company to merchants who cater more towards consumers rather than businesses. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I wanted SOOOO MUCH to want to work with this company, but the rates ended up very high for us. Every single transaction has processed at 3.7% (keyed in cards).

We have the same American customer using the same card in USD. One transaction months ago was processed on the Canadian side in USD and the interchange rate came up at about 2% + cross border fees + card brand fee + Helcim fee = 3.7%. Much later, the same customer charged the exact same card on the US side... the interchange rate jumped to 3% + card brand fee + Helcim fee = 3.7%. Every single other transaction we have processed with Helcim comes in at a total of 3.7%. You don't find out fees until days later after processing a card and money isn't deposited until 1-2 days after that. There isn't much transparency about what all the fees are until calling in and what kinds of cards your customers are using at point of sale.

I initially believed that something was wrong on our account, but they have said that nothing is wrong - it's just that the same cards issued in the USA will come in at a 2% interchange rate when processed in Canada and a 3% interchange rate when processed in the US (then card brand fees and Helcim fees on top of that), which I honestly really do not understand. Again, this means that every single card (for us) has netted at 3.7%.

Customer service has been very good, though, and they ultimately did take exceptional efforts to ensure I understood what had been happening which I very much appreciated. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Support always going above and beyond with solutions, and it appears like they enjoy providing excellent customer service. Doesn't feel forced at all. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Not completely compatible with all our systems. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Helcim offers a complete SaaS solution - credit-card processing, subscription management, and merchant banking - all from a single vendor. In addition, Helcim uses interchange-plus pricing, which is very transparent and avoids us getting overcharged on cheap rate cards, which tends to happen with flat-rate pricing services. Finally, Helcim offers their own hosted payment pages, greatly simplifying deployment. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Helcim was great for the first year, however, over the last 12 months, virtually every deployment has broken the payment process somehow due to bugs, and worse, it has taken weeks to reliably fix the bugs, resulting in thousands of dollars of lost revenue, and hundreds of hours of customer support time for our team. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We had a small sale, Invoice 83565 $126.64 for Embroidery work in our Shop that was mistakenly processed as a Refund on the Credit Card Terminal in our office. It was reversed and charged, back and forth, for a total of seven or eight transactions. Andre helped me to sort out each transaction. Thank you. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We had 2 customers that placed fraudulent orders for face masks or socks that we had to do refunds and chargebacks on Helcim. Small companies like us don't have the in-house legal expertise to deal with the Elavon Banking transactions related to these refunds and chargebacks. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.