Heartland is such an utter piece of garbage. I'd use almost anything before I'd touch it (or any typical shitty enterprise processor) again.
Source: spent a year helping a client migrate from Stripe to Heartland to save a few basis points. Things like faxing docs to terrible APIs to constant lies from sales, who is a bunch of ignorant, rude good ol' boys, just like most of their competitors. Pure incompetence at virtually every point of interaction. Literally have not a single good thing to say.
I'd invest a significant part of my net worth in Stripe if I could. They and companies like them are going to destroy Heartland in the long run, and it can't come soon enough.
Heartland is only strong in the terminal arena, their entire plan for EMV POS systems boils down to Datacap (fucking nightmare you should avoid) and Pax (which is meh). Mercury/Vantiv aren't bad, and are much more developer friendly if you need complex direct integrations, alternatively FD ISOs vary.
The least painful way to integrate is semi-integrated with Pax or Dejavoo, and that way your customer can choose from the majority of processors with minimal work on your end. Typically I see grocers paying under 1% after interchange, network fees, processor fees, etc, hence why there is motivation to deal with the legacy good ol' boys.
Yeah, I'd avoid direct integrations entirely, semi-integrated CC/Debit processing like Pax or Dejavoo is much less painful to implement, and costs less on hardware too. See my other comment.
Source: spent a year helping a client migrate from Stripe to Heartland to save a few basis points. Things like faxing docs to terrible APIs to constant lies from sales, who is a bunch of ignorant, rude good ol' boys, just like most of their competitors. Pure incompetence at virtually every point of interaction. Literally have not a single good thing to say.
I'd invest a significant part of my net worth in Stripe if I could. They and companies like them are going to destroy Heartland in the long run, and it can't come soon enough.