A surcharge is a small fee you can legally add to your customer’s transactions to cover your cost of acceptance of in-store payments that incur MSF. It’s like a little helper on your EFTPOS terminal to balance out the fees for those payment options.
Surcharging can help your business’ bottom line over time. It can be useful: your customers get more ways to pay, and you keep costs under control while offering payment flexibility without needing to raise prices.
Navigating surcharging rules in New Zealand? Let’s make your merchant obligations easy and straightforward. Governed by the Retail Payment System Act 2022 and overseen by the Commerce Commission, these guidelines ensure surcharging is fair to everyone—businesses and consumers alike.
You’re allowed to add a surcharge only on payment methods that add extra costs (incur MSF) for your business. You can’t surcharge cash, eftpos or debit insert/swipe transactions, as these don’t incur additional fees to process the transaction.
A surcharge must be reasonable and cover the actual cost of accepting the payment method. We make this easy by preconfiguring this for you!
The surcharge must be included in the same transaction as the payment. It can’t be collected separately or in cash. Our S920 terminal does the job for you.
The surcharge amount should be clearly displayed on the customer’s receipt. We handle this by including it on the printed transaction receipt from the S920 EFTPOS terminal.
Be upfront with your customers and display clear signage at your point of sale and premises. This lets them know that a surcharge applies and allows them to choose how to pay.
When a customer uses a credit card or contactless payment, our terminal does the math for you! It automatically applies your pre-set surcharge rate, adding it to the transaction amount. The customer sees the surcharge on the terminal, accepts it and completes the payment with a tap or PIN. No manual calculations required!
Surcharging is available on our S920 EFTPOS machine for Long Term and Short Term Rental customers. Once you have contactless/credit cards active on your merchant facility with your bank, simply contact us with your merchant rate and we’ll set this up for free.
Absolutely! You can add a surcharge for just contactless payments, covering all NFC-enabled cards and devices.
Yes, you can print a record of your surcharged transactions on the S920 terminal using the “Shift Total” option. This report will detail the surcharges for each transaction, and you can print it daily or weekly to stay on top of things. The “Shift Totals” reports on credit card (insert/swipe) and contactless surcharges separately.
Surcharge credit card payments made with Visa, Mastercard, UnionPay, AMEX, Diner and JCB cards. If the customer inserts/swipes their credit card and chooses the “credit” option, the programmed surcharge will apply.
For contactless payments, surcharging applies to any Near Field Communication (NFC)-enabled card or device, including payWave, Tap & Go, Apple Pay and Google Pay. The card is not inserted or swiped in the terminal.
