Convenience Fees

Convenience fees let you charge a percentage on credit-card payments to offset processing costs. The fee applies only to credit cards. Debit cards, ACH Debit, check, and other payment methods are never charged, so customers always have a no-fee way to pay.

How They Work

A convenience fee is added to an order only when all three of the following are true:

• Convenience fees are enabled on your account.
• The customer has the convenience-fee toggle turned on.
• The order is paid by a credit card. Debit cards, ACH Debit, check, and other payment methods are never charged.

If any one of these is off, no fee is added.

Enabling Convenience Fees on Your Account

Once the feature is turned on for your account, an admin configures it from Account → Sales → Convenience Fee Settings:

1. Turn on the Convenience fee toggle.
2. Accept the compliance terms.
3. Set the fee percentage, up to the maximum shown next to the field.
4. Save.

Once enabled at the account level, no customer is charged yet. The next step is to choose which customers should pay.

Choosing Which Customers Pay a Convenience Fee

Open each customer who should pay the fee and turn on Convenience Fee in their customer settings. Customers without that toggle on are never charged a convenience fee, even when paying by credit card.

The toggle is only available once that customer has a credit-card payment type enabled. Keep ACH Debit enabled as a payment type for those customers so they always have a no-fee way to pay.

How Fees Apply to Orders

For a customer with convenience fees enabled:

• On a new order, the fee is added when the customer’s default payment method is a credit card. New orders inherit the default automatically.
• On an existing unpaid order, the fee is recalculated whenever the payment method changes. Switching to ACH Debit (or any other non-credit-card payment method, including a debit card) removes the fee. Switching back to a credit card adds it again.

Changing a Customer’s Default Payment Method

When you set a new default payment method on a customer who has convenience fees enabled, RoasterTools asks before applying that payment method to anything else. You’ll see a dialog titled “Update convenience fees on unpaid orders?” listing what would be affected:

• Unpaid sales orders.
• Unsubmitted carts on the portal.

Applying the new payment method may add, remove, or recalculate the convenience fee on each listed item. From the dialog you have two choices:

• Apply to All updates the payment method (and any resulting fee changes) on every listed item, then keeps the new default for future orders.
• Don’t Apply keeps the new default for future orders only. Existing unpaid orders and carts keep their current payment method and fee.

If the customer doesn’t have convenience fees enabled (or your account doesn’t), the new default is applied to that customer’s unpaid orders and portal carts silently. A notification confirms how many were updated. There’s no dialog, because there are no fee changes to weigh.

A few orders may not be updated when you apply the default:

• Orders that are mid-payment (already in the process of being charged) are skipped to avoid disrupting an in-flight charge.
• Orders that fail to update for another reason are called out in the notification that appears after the change. If failures persist, contact support.

Accounting

If your account is connected to a supported accounting platform such as QuickBooks Online, the convenience fee syncs to that platform as a separate line item on each invoice. From the Convenience Fee Settings page, map the convenience-fee item to a revenue account so fee revenue posts to the right account when orders sync.

Why the Convenience Fee Doesn’t Fully Cover Your Processing Costs

The convenience fee is meant to offset most of your credit-card processing cost, not all of it. On your payments page, you may notice the convenience fee you collected is a little lower than the cost on your payout. That’s expected, for two reasons:

• The flat per-payment cost. Your processor charges a small fixed amount on every card payment (often around 30 cents) on top of its percentage. A percentage-based convenience fee doesn’t recover that fixed piece.
• The fee is based on the order subtotal. Your processor’s percentage applies to the full amount charged to the card, including tax and the convenience fee itself. The convenience fee is calculated only on the pre-tax order subtotal, so it comes out slightly lower.

For most orders the fee covers the large majority of the processing cost. Keeping ACH Debit enabled for your customers gives them a no-fee way to pay and avoids the processing cost entirely.