What do you dislike about ViaBill?
Cons
Viabill was always available by phone and email PRIOR to contracting with them. After you sign their contract - the sales rep (Mark E.) never once picked up the phone or returned voice messages. He only replied to an email stating that he does not get involved with anything other than sales matters.
There is virtually zero merchant support. Viabill provides a merchant support phone number of 929-242-1110, however, I was on the phone for 2 days, on hold for over an hour on each occasion, listening to the music with the message informing me, "there are zero callers ahead of you" - and nobody ever answered.
Viabill also advertises a merchant support email, merchants@viabill.com - but every time you email them, you will only receive a robototic automated response that says, "We will respond to you within 2 business days". If they respond, they often do not address the issue and when you reply to try to calrify - you receive the same robotic automated message and are left waiting with unresolved, sometimes time-sensitive and urgent matters, such as not receiving funds that are well-past their stated "3-5" business day turnaround.
Communications and merchant support are a miserable nightmare.
FUNDS TRANSFERS
Viabill advertises they will transfer funds into your business account within 3-5 business days, depending on your bank. The soonest they transfer is on the 6th business day, however, as of the date of this entry, December 30, 2019, I am still awaiting transfers from customer purchases made on and after 12/14/2019. When I try to inquire status, nobody will answer their phones and nobody responds to emails.
I did call their customer support number and was told that they cannot assist merchants, however, I was told that "everybody" in the merchant support and upper management is on holiday, not expected to return until January 6, 2020. So I as a merchant am left without any funds from all transactions made since December 14, 2019 until whenever Viabill personnel return from their holiday after January 6, 2020 - which will most likely be seriously delayed due to their backlog of payouts.
Viabill never provided any type of notice to myself or merchants in the US of any holiday schedule. Not even in their robotic automated email responses nor their merchant 'support' phone number that allows you to stay on hold for an eternity expecting to speak with someone.
WEBSITE INTEGRATION
I was told the Viabill team would integrate in less than an hour - it took approximately 2-weeks. So after I updated my website to reflect the Viabill payment option, I had to shut down all advertising since I could not advertise something I was unable to deliver because I was waiting on their tech@viabill team to finally integrate on my website - a costly lost earnings capacity because of their inability to fulfill their promise.
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Their checkout page on my website redirects the customer to the Viabill registration page. It tells the customer, "Complete your transaction for $'THE WHOLE AMOUNT' " - instead of making any clarification to the customer that by proceeding and providing their information that Viabill will only charge them 25% of the whole amount - it leads to a high percentage of cart abandonment because their checkout process does not assure or make mention to the customer of their actual monthly installment amount - only the entire purchase amount.
The other issue with the Viabill checkout that leads to cart abandonment is that Viabill fails to notify the applying customer they must use their email address associated with their bank card they are using. I have had customers call me asking me, "Why did it say I was declined at this time?". It placed me in a difficult situation because on my Woocommerce page using the Viabill plugin - it states "Customer Cancelled". In reality - the customer did not cancel! I was able to figure this out by talking to a customer who decided to use a different email address that is associated with her bank card then it worked. Viabill should notify the customer they must use their email address associated with their bank card they are using and also Viabill should not inform the merchant of a false status that the "Customer Cancelled" the transaction. This simple fix would greatly reduce cart abandonment.
MERCHANT DASHBOARD
Very basic. It does not allow anyway for a merchant to reconcile transactions with Viabill order numbers. The closest you can reconcile is by the date of the transactions.
WOOCOMMERCE
You must manually monitor for transactions and change the status from "Approved by Viabill" to "Captured by Viabill". There are no notifications available for when a new order is placed and approved by Viabill to the merchant.
If you want to affiliate with a business that will hold your funds for an indefinite time period because they have no staff processing transactions for weeks at a time and nobody to communicate with - then Viabill may be a good fit for your business - otherwise I recommend to stay away!
On a side note - I have even gone as far as purchasing email addresses for those in upper management, including the CEO. They do not respond. Very sad indeed because the concept is great - but operations are a failure. I have read Viabill has received $57 million in investments thus far, I highly doubt these investors have been apprised of these matters ... yet. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
