Merchant Surcharging

emergepay can be configured to automatically apply a surcharge to transactions for your merchant’s account. The API will automatically handle calculating and applying the surcharge amount on a per-transaction basis.

Functionality Not Currently Supported

If a merchant wants to enable surcharging on their account, the following features do not currently support surcharging and will be unavailable for use:
  • Canadian Processing
  • Digital Wallets
  • Mobile Processing Devices (MagTek iDynamo devices)

Enablement

To enable surcharging on your merchant’s account, please reach out to your Relationship Manager or our Business Development team for more information. There are a series of prerequisites that must be met by the merchant before surcharging can be enabled.

To ensure that your merchants are in compliance with card brand guidelines for surcharging, you will need to add messaging to your checkout flow that indicates that a surcharge of x% may be applied to credit card transactions, where x is a percentage value between 0.10 and 3.00. This messaging must be visible to customers anywhere their card can be processed, including places where a tokenized transaction is taking place.

An example of such messaging is included below:

A surcharge of _% will be added if you elect to pay with a credit card, which we assess to cover our cost of acceptance. No surcharge will be added if you elect to pay with a debit card.

API Responses

The existing amount fields in transaction responses will remain unchanged and will not include the surcharge amount that was calculated. Instead, a new consumerSurchargeFee has been added to the response that will indicate the surcharge amount applied.
The new consumerSurchargeFee can have the following values:
  • "" when surcharging is not applicable
  • "0.00" when surcharging was applicable, but the transaction was not approved
  • A value when surcharging was applicable and the transaction approved
A surchargeEligible prop will also be included for merchants that have surcharging available, and is there to provide integrators with information regarding the card used for the transaction.

See the following example below:

{
    "accountCardType": "VS",
    "accountEntryMethod": "Keyed",
    "accountExpiryDate": "1234",
    "amount": "12.00",
    "amountBalance": "",
    "amountProcessed": "12.00",
    "amountTaxed": "0.00",
    "amountTipped": "0.00",
    "approvalNumberResult": "OK6548",
    "avsResponseCode": "NA",
    "avsResponseText": "Not applicable",
    "batchNumber": "0",
    "billingName": "",
    "cashier": "",
    "consumerSurchargeFee": "0.30",
    "createdOn": "2023-02-17T18:00:43.183Z",
    "customerId": "1c8af4f0793f892cb3acbfaa5baa62d33b33c1e70e3b27da2273fc5d0e5a87c6",
    "cvvResponseCode": "M",
    "cvvResponseText": "Match",
    "externalTransactionId": "a1961060-9954-48dc-8f70-6cf876fd9316",
    "isPartialApproval": false,
    "maskedAccount": "************4242",
    "resultMessage": "Approved",
    "resultStatus": "true",
	"surchargeEligible": true,
    "transactionReference": "",
    "transactionType": "CreditSale",
    "uniqueTransId": "f34f0694c7e94733b1390c919f0387df-fa15dbae5e11415d9543f2afd041b988"
}
The transaction above was processed for 12.30, of which:
  • 12.00 was supplied in your request
  • 0.30 was calculated and included as the surcharge amount.

Since the merchant was configured for surcharging and the credit card used was eligible for surcharging the surchargeEligible prop is visible and set to true

Receipts

Any receipts generated must include the surcharge amount that was applied on the transaction as a line item. This value can be found in the transaction response as the consumerSurchargeFee. See the example above in the “API Responses” section for more information.

Refunds

When refunding surcharged transactions, the surcharged amount must be returned as well. In the case of partial refunds, the same percentage of the surcharge must be refunded to the cardholder. For example, for a 50% refund on a $100 sale ($103 after a 3% surcharge), $51.50 must be returned to the customer.

Refunds via Manual Entry

When the refund will be processed via manual entry of the card details, the surcharge will be automatically calculated and added to the total if the card is surcharge eligible. To avoid discrepancies, the same card that received the original payment should receive the refund.

Refunds on Devices

When the refund is processed via a payment terminal, the surcharge will not be added, even on surcharge eligible credit cards. The full amount including the surcharge should be passed to the device to account for this.