vulcan, please correct me if I'm wrong, but I am told over and over by fedex and my company's commercial account rep that the only way they can bill direct to a credit card is to charge each and every shipment as a single distinct charge PER PACKAGE, and in no way will they allow us to pay a WEEKLY or MONTHLY bill in a single charge, whether we call it in, or better yet, wanted to set up an auto-pay via credit card for this SINGLE AGGREGATE weekly fedex invoice for all our shipments for that week? Let's say hypothetically we ship between 5-10 packages a day, and so in a week ship, lets say, 45 packages...and generate, hypotetically, a $500 invoice weekly (and pay weekly by a single fedex invoice)...instead of having any way at all to pay a single $500 payment to a credit card, on an autopayment system ideally, FedEx has told us repeatedly they would have to charge 45 distinct charges in this example. Which, over a month, would be ludicrous and an administrative nightmare.
Our fedex rep has told us customers have left fedex commercial accounts (and gone exclusively with UPS) over fedEx's inability to let commercial (ie high volume) shippers pay ONE AGGREGATE BILL by credit card, instead having to pay each single shipment charge if one was to be able to use a credit card.
Since we obviously do not prefer to get 10-page AMEX bills with each single shipp=ment charge separately, nor wish to try to reconcile such an awkward fedex and then amex bill on a weekly basis, we forgo a nice chunk of miles and starpoints. This is one of the largest untapped sources of prospective affinity points that I have yet to figure out a workaround.

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Please confirm if you have to pay each and every invoice/shipment distinctly using a credit card, or if you are somehow able to pay one aggregate bill using credit card. This is a biggie for, so thanks in advance for your (or anyone else's) response.

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My personal opinion - fedex, being one of the most competent corps in the world with respect to sophisticated IT capability and resources, could easily fix this anomoly...they choose, IMO, to force this weird, literally archaic policy to exist because they do not wish to have commercial shippers paying multi-thousand dollar weekly invoices by a credit card, to then give up 1-2% discount point. They are happpy to LINK a bank account so it can auto-pay a single aggregate invoice, but play this little game when one wants to pay by credit card (and then blame the credit card companies by saying amex won't allow them to charge an aggregate bill). BTW - I finally found (in texas anyway) a power company that lets me charge my commercial and home electricity bill to amex btw (gexaenergy.com, out of Houston, tx). Had found one or more that charged to credit card, but excluded AMEX, but gexaenergy also includes amex. SWEET. This is a nice [starpoint] windfall each month and, a nicer surprise, they easily beat the "price to beat" in Texas' deregulatory environment (ie TXU's price) substantially so there is true savings to boot over our established energy provider. Predictably they are growing like a wildfire.

[This message has been edited by ILUVCITIBANK (edited Dec 24, 2003).]