Let me start off by saying that I like the conveniences of being an American Express cardholder, but as a merchant, it can be frustrating at times. Here are the popular reasons I hear when other small business owners tell me they won’t take AMEX.
Reason #1 – Chargebacks
While it may not be fair to American Express, there are quite a number of folks who say that AMEX is “notorious” for siding with the customer in a charge-back dispute.
At a previous business, I once had a customer who used our 
software for over a year and was paying us software licensing fees in excess of $1,000 per month. When the customer filed for bankruptcy and his business shut down, he called AMEX and claimed that all charges to his credit card from our company – going back months – were all fraudulent.
AMEX immediately reached into our bank account and froze the funds… nearly ten thousand dollars. For a small business, this was a significant amount of our working capital to be taken out of our account. We had to fight for weeks and show the AMEX arbitrator that these were legitimate charges.
I’ll start with this one because this can be very damaging for a business owner’s credit history if this process is not understood well.
