'Convenience' fee add-on

[danny]

Is there a way to add a convenience/transaction to fee to each item purchased? We'd rather not change the base price of a ticket you can buy at the box office, as it's a publicly known amount. But we need to recover the PayPal and credit card fees of online purchases. I tried using the "Handling fee", but it is for the whole purchase, not individual items (and it doesn't seem to work if there are no shipping charges).

[E-junkie_Guru]

Sorry, we do not have any way to do what you described, and card merchant agreements typically prohibit adding any surcharge for card payments, whether online or offline. Even offline purchases using a credit card are still subject to transaction fees, so it's just a cost of doing business that would typically be accounted for in the standard item price regardless of how it's purchased.

[danny]

I understand your point and thank you for the quick response.

But how then does somebody like TicketMaster get away with charging the fees it does?

[E-junkie_Guru]

I think in the case of TicketMaster, they're not charging one fee to card holders and another fee (or none) to everyone else, and they're not the actual venue box office but an independent service, so their fee pertains to the ticket-booking service they are providing as a middleman between the venue and buyers, which is unrelated to the venue's own business.

[danny]

Very well said - I get the picture now. As a third party, you can charge what you want, but the original vendor (me) has to accept getting less money for charges. Sigh.

Thanks.