Surcharges

Surcharging adds a fee to the transaction to cover payment costs — legal in many markets for specific payment methods (e.g. commercial cards in the EU, most cards in Australia), prohibited in others. SpicePay gives you rule-based surcharging with the compliance guardrails built in.

How it works

Surcharge rules run when the customer selects a payment method, before checkout renders the final amount. The customer always sees the surcharge as a distinct line item before paying — as most regulations require.

Rules

Surcharge rules match on payment method, card type (credit vs debit, consumer vs commercial), network, region, and amount:

Commercial credit cards, EU → 1.9% All cards, AU shop → 1.4% capped at A$50 SEPA debit → no surcharge

Values can be a percentage, a fixed amount, or percentage-with-cap.

Compliance guardrails

• Cost ceiling — configure your effective acquiring cost per method; SpicePay refuses rules that surcharge above it in markets where surcharging is capped at cost (EU, AU).
• Prohibited markets — rules never fire for card/country combinations where surcharging is banned (e.g. consumer cards issued in the EU under PSD2, several US states); the engine checks issuer country at decision time.
• Disclosure — Hosted Checkout displays the surcharge as a separate line item with the final total before the customer confirms.

You remain responsible for verifying surcharging is lawful for your business and markets. The guardrails encode common regulations, not legal advice.

Reporting

Surcharge amounts are tracked separately on every transaction, so Payment analytics can answer "how much of my payment cost did surcharging recover" per month, method, and market. Refunds reverse the surcharge proportionally by default.

Testing

Dry-run rules in Surcharges → Evaluate in the Control Center: describe a hypothetical payment and see which rule fires and what the customer would be charged. Rule programs are versioned — edits are drafts until you activate them, and you can roll back instantly.