Feature Request: State Bag Surcharge

[kristina-rtd]

Hello!

I'm based in Maine and we are now required by law to charge 5 cents for every bag used for customer transactions.

On our POS, I simply added a button that my staff uses to add the charge. However, I can't find a way to add this to online orders, and people will not notice or care to do this on their own (I already try to do this for bottle/can deposits and maybe 10% of people are observant/honest enough to do it). Could the developer team create an automatic surcharge function? There is no way to add this otherwise; the secondary tax rate some people use to make up for processing fees isn't an appropriate solution.

[Title of thread has been edited by moderator to include "Feature Request"]

[MJD · Accepted solution]

Hi there @kristina-rtd, welcome to the Square Seller Community!

We have a similar law in the UK which has recently been raised from £0.05 to £0.10 to discourage the use of single use carrier bags. However I don't believe this is a charge that must also be applied online, if in Maine you must now charge this on online orders, your best option would likely be to incorporate the charge in the product cost. You may also want to dig into this law deeper as I know over here we didn't initially have to pay if the business providing the carrier bag had under a certain number of employees, because of this, small businesses weren't made to charge the fee.

If bags are an optional item, add these as a separate item or a modifier for the order, with a banner pop-up on the screen to inform customers of their options around bags.

You may also want to ask this question to the UK sellers in our community forum here: https://www.sellercommunity.com/t5/Seller-Community-UK-Ireland/ct-p/Seller_Community_UK?profile.lang... as UK sellers are likely more experienced when it comes to these charges as out initial 5p charge was introduced almost 6 years ago on the 5th of October 2015!

If this reply has helped significantly to answer your initial question, please select Mark As Best Answer, this helps future users with similar questions to find the answers they're looking for!

[jgrgetich]

how do you add the pop up banner?

[Arie]

Hi @jgrgetich,

Thanks for writing back in! Check out this article for a guide on adding a pop up banner on Square Online 🙂 Please let us know how you go!

[jgrgetich]

Great for Square online.. I am a brick and mortar store.  We use square register for retail.

[joeyD]

I am in the same situation where we are required to charge for customers who need paper bags for their orders. We can add a "service fee" to Delivery and QR code ordering, but not to pickup orders. Seems like the "service fee" function could be used to add the paper bag fee to each order. Not sure why the service fee capability is available for delivery and QR code ordering but not Pickup.