OVERVIEW
Update 2021: NINJA PAY - We now have our own payment gateway that allows for a few more options over most of the standard payment gateways, including the ability to charge the surcharge directly to the customer at the time of checkout, without directly affecting the order itself.
If you'd like to find out more about adding this option to your Webninja site, please contact our sales team - or give us a call on:
+61 7 5667 3499 and select Option 3.
Web Ninja has thoroughly investigated the options for applying credit card surcharges at the time of checkout and have concluded it's simply not feasible to implement within our system.
The RBA have published guidelines and regulations about what's acceptable and not acceptable regarding what surcharges are allowed based on merchant account fees on credit card and debit card transactions. Please review the information and links below regarding this topic.
DETAILS
RBA pages that cover these topics can be found here:
https://www.rba.gov.au/payments-and-infrastructure/review-of-card-payments-regulation/q-and-a/card-payments-regulation-qa-conclusions-paper.html
and
https://www.rba.gov.au/payments-and-infrastructure/review-of-card-payments-regulation/q-and-a/card-payments-regulation-qa-conclusions-paper.html
Why doesn't Web Ninja have an option for applying a surcharge on merchant account transactions?
Unlike most online shopping carts, the Web Ninja platform was designed primarily with B2B functionality in mind - with the primary functionality in mind that we integrate with offline accounting systems (ERPs) and a handful of cloud accounting systems for the purposes of working with existing stock management so you don't have to reinvent the wheel and double-handle data for stock and product management within your e-commerce platform.
As such - we integrate with over 15 accounting packages, each one has their own unique way of dealing with pricing.
We integrate with:
- special pricing rules
- price levels
- we have to account for coupons
- gift vouchers
- some customers' product prices have GST built in
- others have pricing excluding GST and then we have to add GST onto the final value in the checkout
- In addition, we integrate with numerous payment gateways - all of which have their own rules and methods in how they allow us to communicate and send pricing data.
SUMMARY
With all these factors compounded - we would need to account for each and every possible variation to be able to apply a surcharge - at this point, the possible variances are almost infinite - making this simply not feasible to implement no matter how many hours we'd apply our dev team to implement it.
On the RBA website in the links above - look for the heading regarding How can I avoid paying a surcharge?
This covers incorporating the surcharge into the cost of the products - otherwise providing other alternative payment methods that don't incur a fee
(see also - the updated note at the top of this article from 2021 regarding Ninja Pay)