How to Create and Apply Convenience Fees in the Portal

How To - Use this guide to understand the difference between Convenience Fees and Surcharges, how to create a Convenience Fee, and how To apply Convenience Fees in different applicable scenarios.

What is a Convenience Fee?

A Convenience Fee is a fee allowed to be charged for the convenience of using an alternative payment channel.

Example: A Merchant primarily accepts payments in-person or MOTO (mail or telephone orders). The Merchant also offers a website as an alternative payment method.

Alternative payment method acceptance allows the Merchant to charge a convenience fee for those card-not-present transactions.

However, if the Merchant’s only method of acceptance is card-not-present transactions, they are not permitted to charge a convenience fee.

How are Convenience Fees different from Surcharges?

A Convenience Fee can be a flat or fixed amount regardless of the transaction amount.
A Surcharge must be a percentage of the total transaction amount and cannot exceed 3%.

Convenience Fee vs Surcharge – Know the Difference

As legal complications can occur, Payrix does not recommend applying Surcharges.

Creating and Applying Convenience Fees in the Portal

Before You Begin: Convenience Fees - Requirements and Restrictions

Read the Convenience Fees requirements and restrictions below to make sure you adhere to platform compliance regulations:

Convenience Fees must be disclosed to customer before completion of a transaction.
You must allow cardholders to cancel the transaction upon reading this disclosure.
Convenience Fees are only allowed for credit and signature debit card types.
Convenience Fees are only allowed for card-not-present transaction types.
Convenience fees cannot be applied to recurring, subscription or installment transactions.

Setup

Step 1: From the Portal Dashboard, click Groups (located in the left navigation bar under Management).

Step 2: Select the Group to apply the fee to -

Existing Group: Select the Group from the page list.
No or New Group: Create a new Group with the + ADD GROUP button and select the new merchant from the list.

Step 3: In the Group Profile, select Fees from the left hand menu.

Step 4: Within Fees, click the + ADD FEES button located in the upper right.

Step 5: Set up the fee by setting up the fee trigger, how much the fee is, and the numerical fee amount.

Set “When to trigger the fee?” to Capture.
Set “How much is the fee?” (or type) to Actual.

Actual should be used in Transaction Fee configurations with amount set to the specific dollar amount.

Percentage or Surcharge may not be used in a Transaction Fee configuration.

Step 6: Set the “Amount” to the desired actual amount, written as an integer value to represent a dollar amount (Example: 2.50 = $2.50).

Step 7: Set ”Fee start date” to the desired start date or set today’s date to implement your convenience fee immediately.

Step 8: Click Add.

Example: Setting up your Convenience Fee to only apply for transactions below $100.

Under the ADVANCED OPTIONS section of the Add Fees popup, setting the Conditional Rule for “Transaction is less than” allows you to set up a Convenience Fee for any amount less than $100, and the fee will only apply to transactions below the amount of $100 after applying this conditional rule.

Creating and Applying Convenience Fees via the API

When applying a convenience fee, the fee should be added to the total amount, therefore the total should include the transaction amount and fee amount.

The convenience fee works by setting a fees.schedule to trigger when a monetary event happens, such as authorization, capture, or refund. A fees.schedule is the trigger schedule or event on which a fee is assessed (such as authorization, refund, or capture).

Request Body Example - Creating a $2.50 Convenience Fee Schedule via API

CODE

POST /fees

JSON

{
    "entity": "{{entityID_1}}",
    "forentity": "{{entityID_2}}",
    "type": 1,
    "name": Convenience Fee $2.50",
    "schedule": 7,
    "scheduleFactor": 1,
    "start": "20240216",
    "um": 2,
    "amount": 250,
    "currency": "USD",
}

Applying Convenience Fees for PayFields

When utilizing PayFields, you set a transaction amount and set the PayFields.config.mode value to 'txn' or 'txnToken', as shown below, to submit a payment transaction and generate a token at the same time:

Request Body Example - Creating Transaction Token to Apply Convenience Fee via PayField

txn PayFields.config.mode

CODE

PayFields.config.amount = '250';
PayFields.config.mode = 'txn';

txnToken PayFields.config.mode

CODE

PayFields.config.amount = '250';
PayFields.config.mode = 'txnToken';

With this txnToken, you can apply the same convenience fee you created using the standard transaction method by connecting to the /txns endpoint (where your fee field has already been configured).

More Information

Convenience Fee vs Surcharge – Know the Difference

A convenience fee is a charge added when your customers make a purchase using an alternate payment channel. A surcharge is a fee you can add to every credit card purchase made by your customers.

A surcharge is calculated fee requested by a Referrer for credit card purchases made by a customer. A surcharge covers the credit card fees associated with the transaction, as closely aligned to interchange costs as possible.
A convenience fee is a fee implemented by a Referrer for the ability to pay for a product or service using an alternative/non-traditional payment method (in our case: a credit card) where normally a Merchant would only accept cash or check as traditional payment methods in transactions charging the customer for its products and/or services.
The Referrer then charges the Merchant a fee for facilitating the Merchant’s ability to accept an alternative payment method (a credit card).

Both surcharges and convenience fees are regulated by credit card companies and governments. Surcharges, for example, can only be assessed to a Merchant’s customers when surcharges are legal in the customer’s state.