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Is surcharging right for your business?

In This Article

What is a surcharge?

A surcharge is a fee you add to your customer's bill when they are using a credit card for payment to cover your merchant account costs/expenses. Many businesses like this because these fees are being paid by someone else.

What you need to know before you decide

While surcharging reduces your out of pocket expenses, there are a lot of other considerations to think about before you add it to your account.

    • The amount of the surcharge can be no more than the cost of acceptance and no more than 3% (whichever is lower) and debit cards cannot be surcharged. While you will recoup some fees, surcharging won't completely eliminate the cost of accepting credit cards.
    • If you issue a refund, the full amount of the payment including the full surcharge amount must be returned to the cardholder.
    • Surcharging is legally prohibited in some states and some state laws limit the surcharge amount beyond standard card brand limits. 
    • Consider how this impacts the customer experience. Many cardholders have a negative reaction to covering card processing fees and some avoid businesses that surcharge altogether. Are your clients more or less likely to react the same way?
    • What are your competitors doing? Is this the standard in the industry or could it cause customers to go elsewhere?

Helpful resources

How to add surcharging to your account

Surcharging is only available by request. If you want to pass credit card fees to your customers, click submit a request and complete the form to have our support team add the surcharging feature to your account. This opens a Support Ticket.

As soon as you receive a reply that the feature has been added to your account, you can configure and enable surcharging in Settings.