credit card fees to be paid by members
Our members love being able to pay their membership dues by credit card. However, our biggest gripe with the payment systems that apricot supports is that there doesn't appear to be a way to give the credit card processing fee to the member, rather than our company. Since our membership costs are very high ($36,750), these small (~ 3.5%) fees really cost us a lot of money ($1,286.25), and it would be very helpful if we could pass these fees back on to the member.
For example, if there was a way to allow members to manually enter in the amount they want to pay by credit card (including the 3.5% fee), rather than automatically having to pay the full invoice amount (less the 3.5% fee). I know Intuit QuickBooks allows the members to add the fee to their payment, but Apricot doesn't support intuit quickbooks online payments.
Amanduh157
shared this idea
Many thanks for your comments and feedback in this thread - it was super helpful for us in analysis and design of the feature.
I'm happy to announce that we're working on adding donations to compensate payment processing fees. This feature will be released later this year.Some design decisions I wanted to speak out explicitly:
1. We decided to proceed with optional donations to compensate credit card processing fees as opposed to surcharges/convenience fee.
Main reasons for this is that there are too many regulations around mandatory charges to compensate fees: it's illegal in some countries/states, there are caps on how much you could charge, etc. To avoid all of this legal complications we decided to suggest members to opt-in to compensate processing fees, as opposed to make them obligatory.
All these transactions will be recorded as donations in WA and can be later used for tax deduction.
2. You will be able to set the amount of donation based on amount of payment (e.g. 2.9% +$0.3) based on your average transaction fees.
Reason for this is that it's technically almost impossible to calculate amount of fee before transactions is done - there are too many variables in place: currency conversions, cross-border fees, different fees for credit card brands, etc.
Thanks again for you support, votes and feedback. We really appreciate it!
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Phil Anderson
commented
I'm fairly sure you can set a % fee like a credit card surcharge in the tax settings - tax rules. I use this for events but would assume it works for membership renewals?
