CardFellow's closely monitored matchmaking platform allows merchants to evaluate carefully selected bids for credit card processing services.
WRITTEN & RESEARCHED BY
Expert Contributor
Last updated onUpdated
REVIEWED BY
Expert Contributor
| Total Rating | 4.6 |
|---|---|
| Fees & Rates4.5 | |
| Products & Services4.6 | |
| Contract4.8 | |
| Sales & Advertising Transparency4.8 | |
| Customer Service3.5 | |
| User Reviews5.0 | |
Table of Contents
Note: CardFellow’s matchmaking service is down at the time of update. The site claims this is a temporary development, but no timetable has been given for the resumption of services.
CardFellow is a comparison shopping engine for merchant accounts. The company lets you pit competing credit card processors against each other in a bid to win your business in a process formally known as a reverse auction. The idea is to save you some haggling and headaches by having CardFellow solicit processor bids on your behalf but then ultimately give you complete control over the final decision.
You can also invite quotes from other processors through the system, but CardFellow’s safeguards will not back these bids. Still, the platform’s power is its ability to compare any quotes side-by-side automatically.
CardFellow only certifies quotes with interchange-plus pricing (a.k.a. pass-through or cost-plus pricing) and no cancellation fee. Merchant Maverick also holds our highest rated payment processors to these standards (among others), so this is a major point in its favor. In fact, a few of our favorite providers are in CardFellow’s certified quote list.
| Products & Services4.6 |
|---|
| Software & Services 5.0 |
| Hardware & Equipment 4.2 |
Note that if you are not already familiar with how card processing costs work, I’d suggest reading our complete guide to credit card processing rates and fees first.
Here’s how CardFellow’s matchmaking service works:
1. Sign Up: Create an account and enter a few basic stats about your business. You can return to these forms at any time to adjust your stats, and your processing costs inside the quotes will automatically adjust as well.
2. Quote Comparison: After entering your stats, a comparison dashboard for your four initial quotes appears within seconds. You can always invite more quotes if you’d like. The quote comparisons display handy information (such as whether the processor charges a cancellation fee). You can also click on the plus sign to see what equipment the processor has.
Cardfellow presents costs using a $10,000 sales volume as an example.
3. Quote Detail: Clicking on your results’ logos lets you drill down on the details of each quote. You can toggle between the categories of the fees you’ll be charged.
You can scroll down to see contract terms, start-up costs, monthly and annual fees, and transaction fees by card.
4. Choose this Quote: Once you’ve decided, you’re ready for the “Choose this Quote” button. You must relinquish your anonymity at this point, so the processor can contact you directly and begin the application process.
| Fees & Rates4.5 |
|---|
| Pricing 5.0 |
| Affordability 4.0 |
The CardFellow marketplace is free to use, but like any free service, there’s always a built-in cost. In this case, CardFellow receives a small commission as a referral fee from the processor that you choose.
CardFellow requires processors submitting certified quotes to use transparent interchange-plus pricing. Additionally, all quotes are locked in for life and monitored by CardFellow to ensure they don’t increase at any point in time. Those two factors alone are huge advantages when shopping for a merchant account.
Be careful about add-on features from CardFellow’s product directory, especially payment gateways (all eCommerce merchants need one). These often come with a monthly and/or per-transaction fee. As of this review, you must inquire separately about the pricing of most gateways when adding them to your quotes in CardFellow. Gateway costs should be counted into your effective rate, but the system is currently not adding them in automatically. CardFellow is waiting for all the vendors to update these pricing stats.
Here’s another point of caution: The platform is designed to handle practically every business scenario but not drastic adjustments from a single user. You can make small adjustments, but if you need to adjust your stats significantly, you should reach out to CardFellow to reset your profile with a clean slate.
Remember, you can also request and compare more quotes than the initial four. Non-certified quotes may come through CardFellow in interchange-plus form, but it’s quite likely they’ll be in tiered or flat-rate formats.
If you’re going with a non-certified quote, I’d recommend checking our review of that processor first.
| Sales & Advertising Transparency4.8 |
|---|
| Sales Practices 5.0 |
| Web Presence 4.6 |
CardFellow’s advertising is straightforward. The website is forthcoming in a number of places about the way the company makes money, and CardFellow claims to earn the same commission regardless of the processor you choose. We aren’t privy to the exact standards CardFellow holds the processors for which it certifies quotes, but we were given the highlights (such as interchange-plus pricing).
Even though CardFellow doesn’t certify or officially “recommend” any processors, the legal agreement with each processor means CardFellow stands behind the certified quote and, at least by extension, the processor itself when operating inside the marketplace. The point is that you’re using a closely monitored sales process.
CardFellow’s oversight should help eliminate most of the pushy and dishonest tactics often used by sales reps in the industry. The worst I experienced was several follow-up sales emails from a processor through the anonymous messaging system — quite benign in the grand scheme of processor badgering.
| Contract4.8 |
|---|
| Commitment 5.0 |
| ETF & Other Fees 4.6 |
Processors placing certified bids within the CardFellow marketplace will not charge you a cancellation fee. In other words, your merchant account will be on a month-to-month agreement. Waiving early termination fees is one of the primary criteria for quote certification in CardFellow’s system. Of course, you should never trust a cancellation fee waiver unless you get it in writing. CardFellow ensures you receive a copy of the waiver.
You also do not have a contract with CardFellow, nor are you obligated to choose a processor through CardFellow if you obtain quotes. You will only be asked to agree to CardFellow’s terms of service when you create an account.
| Customer Service3.5 |
|---|
| Personal Support 4.2 |
| Self-Service 2.8 |
| CardFellow Customer Service | Availability |
|---|---|
| Phone Support | |
| Email Support | |
| Support Tickets | |
| Live Chat | |
| Dedicated Support Representative | Through your processor |
| Knowledge Base or Help Center | |
| Videos & Tutorials | |
| Company Blog | |
| Social Media |
Ongoing support and personalized guidance are hallmarks of CardFellow’s service. Accordingly, I’ve already discussed most of the support services in this review’s Products & Services section.
More than simply a marketplace for quotes, CardFellow will act as your personal consultant and continue to monitor the account you end up with by performing an audit every six months.
Through the certified bid and acceptance process, you should end up with a dedicated account representative from your processor who will be your main point of contact. That said, do examine your potential processor’s customer service details and reputation by conducting some research of your own.
| User Reviews5.0 |
|---|
| Customer Feedback 5.0 |
| Review Site Aggregate 5.0 |
CardFellow is currently not accredited with the Better Business Bureau, but there aren’t any negative reviews or complaints registered with the watchdog group.
It’s important to remember that the lack of negative feedback about CardFellow does not mean all the processors that provide certified quotes also maintain spotless track records. It does mean that if merchants are upset about their experiences with the processors they signed up for via CardFellow, they are not blaming CardFellow for guidance toward bad decisions.
If you take a look at the testimonials CardFellow puts on its website, you’ll see a comment, the commenter’s name, and the name of their business. Many of the recurring themes are echoed in the Verified Review sections of the individual processor profiles on the site. Here are the most common points of praise for CardFellow:
Most of the external praise for CardFellow is within articles about searching for a good credit card processor. Google reviews have collected a handful of testimonials as well, and you’ll also find positive testimonials in our Comment section.
CardFellow will likely be a pleasant experience for the average merchant. The signup process is painless and straightforward, the UI is sleek and intuitive, and the quote data is displayed in an understandable way. My impression is that CardFellow really understands the ins and outs of this industry and has set up a fair and valuable system for merchants.
Besides number crunching, you also enjoy the benefits of CardFellow’s personalized expertise and guidance through the gauntlet of choosing a processor. And the best part? The service is free to use. For these reasons and more, I highly recommend creating an account with CardFellow. Users who’ll see the greatest benefit from CardFellow will be those who don’t care to learn much about interchange and pricing models; they just want someone else to help them save money quickly.
If you are already knowledgeable in this area, you can probably negotiate some reasonable rates. Meanwhile, there’s no reason you can’t use Merchant Maverick’s merchant account reviews and CardFellow's number-crunching platform in tandem! I recommend that you check out both.
We evaluate and test each payment processor that we review at Merchant Maverick, placing special emphasis on certain key characteristics in order to generate our granular ratings for merchant accounts and credit card processors.
For payment processing reviews, we use a 24-point rubric to evaluate the provider. First, we look at pricing structure – interchange plus, subscription-based, tiered, or hybrid – giving the most points to providers that provide fair, transparent pricing and docking those that rely on tiered models. Then we examine rates, the presence and transparency of early termination fees, and any additional fees.
We also look at contract length and fairness and test out sales staff and customer service channels ourselves to ensure that the company uses reputable, above-the-board sales techniques. Finally, we take the company’s online reputation into account, reading customer reviews and comments.
Read more about how we rate payment processors.
The Merchant Maverick Seal of Approval 🏆
CardFellow |
|---|
After hours of in-depth research and evaluation, we can confidently recommend this brand to our readers. Get started today and see CardFellow for yourself.
The Merchant Maverick Seal of Approval 🏆
CardFellow |
|---|
After hours of in-depth research and evaluation, we can confidently recommend this brand to our readers. Get started today and see CardFellow for yourself.
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The vendors that appear on this list were chosen by subject matter experts on the basis of product quality, wide usage and availability, and positive reputation.
Merchant Maverick’s ratings are editorial in nature, and are not aggregated from user reviews. Each staff reviewer at Merchant Maverick is a subject matter expert with experience researching, testing, and evaluating small business software and services. The rating of this company or service is based on the author’s expert opinion and analysis of the product, and assessed and seconded by another subject matter expert on staff before publication. Merchant Maverick’s ratings are not influenced by affiliate partnerships.
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Our team of experts spends hours on every review so that we can find the best companies to recommend to our readers. CardFellow made the cut.
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