The Second Payment Services Directive (PSD2) introduces rules for European online payments and financial services.
This article focuses on the ban on surcharges for payments made by card (one specific consequence of PSD2).
This article covers:
The surcharge ban
The PSD2 surcharge ban (from January 13, 2018) applies to all EEA businesses and prohibits extra fees for debit or credit card payments. Each country decides how to implement and define the rules.
In the UK, the Treasury expanded the ban to include PayPal transactions. Overall, it includes payment via all major card companies (e.g. Visa, Mastercard, etc.).
What should I do?
If you're a business within the EEA and you're charging additional fees for online payments, you need to ensure that you turn this off and stop charging fees to comply with the law.
However, there are two possible 'workarounds' below.
If you only accept online payments and not other non-card methods such as cash, cheque, or bank transfer, you can still apply fees.
This is not considered discrimination against card-paying customers since all customers are charged the same fee.
You can impose a fee for both online and offline payments to ensure there is no discrimination against card payers, as everyone incurs the same fee regardless of the payment method.
💡 Important note: We do not currently support the ability to add fees to non-card payments (offline). However, you may wish to increase your ticket prices to include the fee.
Switching off your payment fees on Bookwhen:
Select Settings from the left-hand menu, then Payments
Select Edit next to your provider:
Select Edit:
Then untick the box for Add an online payment fee to bookings?:
✨ Select Save to save your changes.
Can I increase my ticket prices to compensate?
You can increase your ticket prices to compensate for both online and offline payments.
However, please consider the following:
Covering the fee completely is difficult due to the precise charging structure of payment providers (flat fee + % per transaction).
Achieving a balance between covering costs and avoiding overcharging customers can be challenging, so please proceed with caution when doing this.
Guidance for UK businesses
You can add a surcharge to cover only online payment gateway processing fees. You will need to match it to the payment platform you are using. For example, Stripe is currently 1.5% + 20p. You cannot exceed that amount.
However, it’s important to note that there are exceptions and certain charges that traders can legitimately apply:
Cost of Processing: Traders are allowed to charge consumers for the cost of processing payments. For instance, if a business incurs a fee for processing a particular card payment, they can pass on this exact cost to the customer. The charge must not exceed the actual cost incurred by the trader.
Taken from UK Gov Site Document:
9.1 What can be charged
9.2 It is important that surcharges can only consist of costs borne by the payee/trader for use of the payment method in question. For card payments, the government considers that legitimate surcharges could include fees directly charged to the payee such as:
The Merchant Service Charge, which companies pay to their payment service provider. This includes the interchange fee paid by the company’s payment service provider to the card issuer, the fees paid by the company’s payment service provider to the scheme (for example, Visa or Mastercard); and the margin retained by the company’s payment service provider to cover costs and profit; or
The transaction/overhead fees paid by the company to intermediaries for some or all of the merchant services usually provided by the payment service provider.This is where an intermediary acts as a point of contact for companies and typically deals with the payment service provider, charging a mark-up on the payment service provider’s fees for the relevant services.
9.3 Importantly, the government’s intention is that the general costs of running a business not directly incurred in a consequence of use of the payment method in question cannot be included in a surcharge. Consequently, indirect costs, such as general administrative overheads or staff training, equipment installations and set-up fees must not be included in any surcharge.
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