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What is a surcharge?
A surcharge is an extra fee charged alongside the purchase to recoup additional cost from your customers when they choose to use a payment method that incurs a cost for you to provide. Common examples are the acceptance of credit card or contactless debit card payments for which you incur Merchant Service Fees.
Some payment methods do not incur costs, such as EFTPOS or debit cards that are accepted via insert or swipe, and so payments with these methods should not have a surcharge applied.
Guidelines for surcharges
If you’re thinking about applying a surcharge, we would encourage you to look through the guidance that the Commerce Commission has recently released. Outside of just recouping costs, there are a number of factors that may influence your decision to apply a surcharge, such as the customer and staff experience when processing payments with surcharges.
How to set up surcharging
Surcharging is set up on your payment terminal or online payment page, so you will need to contact your terminal provider or payment service provider to get started. As part of this process, you will need to decide on the appropriate surcharging rate.
To set up surcharging on ASB Accept please call 0800 272 555 option 7 or option 1 after hours.
Calculating an appropriate surcharging rate
Your total monthly fee for accepting credit and contactless card payments has two components: Interchange fees and the Merchant Service fee. By adding these two together, dividing by your total sales then multiplying by 100, you can come up with an appropriate surcharge rate. An example of this calculation is below:
To get a more accurate rate, you can perform this calculation across different months statements and use the average of the different rates. It's also recommended that the rate is reviewed throughout the year or when there are changes that may impact the rate, such as turning contactless on or off.
If you are an ASB Merchant and require a copy of your merchant statement, please contact the ASB contact centre on 0800 803 804 or your relationship manager if you have one.
Merchant Service Fee Pricing
You can find out more about Merchant Pricing and Merchant Service Fees here.
