Clover

If you run a Clover, you almost certainly did not buy it from Clover. You bought it from a bank, an independent sales organization, or the software vendor that runs your business, and that company wrote your pricing, your term, and your equipment paperwork. Fiserv built the device and takes the processing. It does not publish what the seller in the middle is allowed to charge you. We set out what Clover itself charges, and what gets added before the bill reaches you, on its own page.

That split is the whole story of this rating. Clover’s own direct offer is one of the more transparent things a merchant can buy in this industry: the prices are on the website, the service agreement runs a year, and either side can walk on thirty days’ notice. The Clover that most merchants actually have is a different product with the same logo on it.

This page scores the platform as merchants encounter it, including conduct by Fiserv that reaches Clover accounts. Where a matter belongs to Fiserv rather than to Clover, we say so.

A Clover Merchant Services Agreement form published by the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine carries this line, in capitals, already typed: “This is a NON-CANCELABLE lease for the full term indicated.” Directly above it sits an empty field reading “Lease Term: _________ Months” and a lease company line naming First Data Global Leasing.

Read those two lines together. The clause that traps you is boilerplate, printed at head office. The variable that decides how much the trap costs, the number of months, is left for the person sitting across your counter to write in. Nothing in the form caps it.

Independent review publications including Merchant Maverick, CardPaymentOptions and PaymentPop consistently report terms in the thirty six to forty eight month range on this channel, and describe leases that cannot be cancelled during the initial term. We have not located a current published lease form that sets a standard length, so we report the range as reported rather than as Clover’s stated policy.

One more thing about that lease: it is usually held by a separate finance company. Closing your merchant account does not close it. Merchants describe paying for terminals they have already sent back.

The same agreement grants Fiserv a unilateral amendment right: “We have the right to change or add to the terms of this Agreement at any time”, with any use of the service after publication of the change counting as acceptance. That is the document version we were able to obtain, dated 2016. We could not locate a current published United States form, and we say so rather than pretend the 2016 text is today’s.

Fiserv’s own partner page tells sales organizations the programme “enables you to have more pricing flexibility when you choose to sell Fiserv products to merchants.” That is the mechanism, stated by the manufacturer, in its own marketing. The reseller sets your price.

What Fiserv does not publish is any limit on it. The Clover Reseller Terms and Conditions cover use of the Clover name and badge. They contain no pricing obligation, no fee disclosure duty, no certification standard and no audit right over what the merchant is charged. Fiserv’s annual report describes a channel of agent sales forces, software vendors, sales organizations and banks, and acknowledges in its risk factors that these partners compete against each other. It gives no count of them. Fiserv’s own certified partner directory names 69 firms, which is a directory of the approved, not a census of the channel.

A note on a number you may have seen. The figure of five thousand Clover resellers circulates widely. We could not source it, to Fiserv or to anyone else, and we do not print it. The documented facts are the ones above: the sellers set the price, and Fiserv publishes neither their number nor their limits.

On portability, the picture is consistent but not confirmed by the company. CardFellow, Merchant Maverick and Host Merchant Services all report that a Clover device is bound to the bank or sales organization that sold it and cannot be reprogrammed onto a different processor. No Clover contract we read contains a device lock clause, which suggests the restriction is operational rather than contractual. NerdWallet’s review states the opposite, that Clover can be paired with third party processors, and we believe that conflates Clover’s semi integration software kit, which lets outside point of sale software drive a Clover payment device, with actually moving the processing. Fiserv has published nothing that settles it. We report the conflict rather than pick the version that suits the rating.