Credit Card Reader

Personally, I believe corproate is flailing and doing anything it can to squeeze it's franchisees more and more to try and recoup all the money they have lost from all the club closings around the country. What should happen is club owners in all states start writing and calling their representatives and senators and any other authority in their states to look into what corporate has and is doing to its franchisees and, perhaps, initiate a class-action suit. Many people have been financially harmed by the pure greed of the top people in this franchise.

The fact that they can not seem to integrate Fitware with Visa Account Updater is a telling sign of the ineptitude of the corporate powers that be. Only about a 150,000,000 credit cards due to be changed for new chip enabled cards. This includes new expiration dates so every zee will have dozens and dozens of declines that could have been avoiced with the account updater. Way to go corporate!

So I just read in the Snap Forum that corporate will not be pursuing the Visa Updater because it only works for Visa cards. Well guess what? Visa cards accounted for 80% of my bouncebacks this month! So yeah, clearly we don't need this program!! But of course, if they gave us this they would lose a ton of fees from the great Decline Recovery program they just forced on us.

We've begun evaluating alternative billing solutions, primarily for collecting our monthly recurring dues and also our point of sale items. One of the qualifiers we have is that they automatically update member billing when a change occurs. This is available with the company's basic solution and at a fixed cost of $38/month plus transaction costs (which are also lower than what we're currently paying). They also have a decline-recovery-like program, but it's a live person who calls. There's also an option to send the account to collections if it goes beyond 2 months. For this they take a percentage of what's collected. They also provide the card reader at no cost. Am I missing something? Why isn't everyone moving their billing away from Snap's awful service? I understand that we'll still have the monthly cost of fitware, on top of the $38 cost of the billing software. However, we're estimating that even with the additional cost we'll save about $500/month as well as the time it takes us calling members for new billing. I also understand that our monthly reports won't be of any use, but it's not worth the cost IMHO.

Amy, We'll most likely be going with our local Wells Fargo bank. They offer us everything we've mentioned above. We found a bunch of fitness software companies who also offer automatic credit card updating, but it's all bundled in with their member management as well as door management and so it's at a higher cost. What's frustrating is that all of those things bundled together are less than what we're being charged for fitware. That's with just one instance of the software. Over a larger base that cost drops dramatically. Some of the companies we've been speaking with are Affiliated Software, Motionsoft, Twin Oaks and Shape.net.

We'll only be using fitware to keep track of member data and provide door access. No financial information will be kept within fitware. We believe it's irresponsible for us to trust the liftbrands team with our members' financial information. They've proven over and over again that they don't understand what they're doing.

There are a couple ways we thought about doing it. One is to set everyone on statement and their dues to $0. It looks like this will require us to go in and reset everyone back to okay status. The other is to pick a date in the future, let's say 1/1/2018 and make everyone a prepay. If their billing doesn't go through in the other system then we set them to delinquent. On 1/1/18 or close to that date we'll need to go into all of the accounts and reset them.

It may sound like a pain, but we had almost 8% of our members come up as delinquent this month. Of those a total of almost 3% told us that we should just go ahead and cancel their membership since it didn't go through this month. All of these could have been avoided if the billing were simply updated. I've been on the other end of the phone when my credit card on file had changed and it was a service I wasn't really using. When presented with the option of updating or just canceling I typically canceled. I don't feel like taking the time out of my schedule to see what process I need to go through to cancel and then actually following through with it, but if I can simply say, just go ahead and cancel, and know that they don't have my credit card info then I'll just cancel. I've spoke with friends and all but 1 of them do the same thing.

This is probably the easiest way to improve retention numbers and Snap simply ignores it because it'll eat into their decline recovery fee. Their autodialers and emails recover nothing and all it serves is to tax us for their refusal to update the member billing. In addition it requires us to spend hours on the phone getting new billing info and having to listen to members tell us to just go ahead and cancel it.

As far as additional staff hours, it'll be far less than the time they spend on the phone and we're currently working with someone on fiverr to set this up so that can be automatically updated. This will take the staff's time to 0 to deal with this.

When will Snap stop putting their pennies as a higher priority to their franchisees' dollars?