Pivotal Payments and Active Club Management Provide Maximum Support for Wine Clubs with IP Gateway Options

May 5, 2005 - Livermore, CA - Active Club Management and Pivotal Payments deliver a streamlined solution for wine clubs.

Wineries found dial-up solutions painfully slow when it comes to processing wine clubs. Customers tolerate a 30 second approval process when paying for a purchase in person. Processing a wine club is a different story. A club of 300 people being processed at 30 seconds each would take 2 and a half hours to process.

In addition to their special service Pivotal Payments has agreed to offer special rates for the Active Club Management customers. Finding a provider who understands what an IP Gateway is can be its own challenge. Very few organizations deal with IP Gateways and the respective customer service is less than helpful. Even when dealing with an organization who provides an IP Gateway, more times than not, the gateway is not set up correctly and it requires time consuming calls to their support department to correct the problems.

Pivotal Payments is one of the leading providers of payment processing and merchant account solutions, and our experience with them has been so positive that we were happy to sign an agreement with them. The agreement assigns a specific representative to Active Club Management customers. "Our customers will have excellent customer support from knowledgeable representatives - this will save us all a tremendous amount of time" stated Theresa Dorr, Active Club Management. www.pivotalpayments.com

The preparation before and follow-up after a club release can make a significant difference in the success of a wine club in respect to the revenue generated and membership retention. Wineries report that the time put aside to prepare for a shipment just does not exist. Wineries charge the cards for the release at the time of the shipment and then work after the fact to contact the declined card members. With the demands of the business many times the cards that don't get approved with the first try just get left unprocessed and wineries lose money.

Active Club Management is connected through an IP Gateway and the process takes place without requiring any human interaction. The system is scheduled to automatically run the pre-authorization process. Once complete, a detailed report is emailed to the manager(s) to inform them of the results.

Active Club Management provides a software service which works as a club assistant and performs key job functions behind the scenes with no assistance required from staff members. When designing the application the team identified tasks that were repeated and which could be performed by the software. By having the software perform the respective functions the businesses can spend less time managing their clubs and more time growing them.

About Active Club Management: Active Club Management offers an affordable and powerful solution for wine club management. Serving over 100 clubs in boutique operations and large, multi-locations organizations Active Club Management is customized to the needs of each business. The solution works like a personal club assistant and is specifically built to offer seamless integration with other accounting, POS, Inventory and shopping cart solutions.

For more information, visit www.activeclubmanagement.com