New Card Loading Fee

[piddlinpottery]

I have been trying to find a place to send a formal complaint about the new gift card loading fee that square has decided to charge for ALL gift card formats, but there apparently is no place to do so other than creating a discussion here.

This new fee is ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS. Not only will we be charged the credit card fee, plus the cost of the cards that are already invested in, now there's an additional 2.5% of the card value to be added to that. So to sell a $50 gift card it now costs me close to $4 including the cost of the card?  Not to mention, the fee applies also to egift cards! 

I was already on the verge of finding a new POS because of all the fragmented services that you have to pay monthly for, the constant barrage of issues with the Retail app, etc. but now I will for sure be looking for a new system. I know this is the same for quite a lot of sellers in my industry as well.

I saw another post that said they had to do this in order to provide new benefits to the service or something like that, but the only benefit I see to this is more of the small business money in squares pockets. I hope, but doubt, that square takes these complaints they are getting to heart and considers reverting to the old gift card policy. 

[DLRosenberg]

I completely agree with you.

We have for the past 5 years in business never passed fees onto our customers.. but with this gift card situation... I may have to charge a surcharge on physical gift cards.. or get rid of them all together. 99% of our gift card purchases are made with CC... Square is already receiving their cut.

With this new fee.. costs associated with gift cards are going to be around 5%... that's INSANE!

[Candlestore]

@DLRosenberg ;

Just be careful how you word these fees because if its close to a Credit Card Surcharge you could be in violation of the Credit Card industries fees rules.   Most CC only allow a 3% fee, and as you pointed out it could be close to 5%.  

I always built my CC processing fees into my pricing, but with this I agree with you that I may have to charge a fee like other bigger stores do for their gift cards.  I already saw flat fees for buying store gift cards, and thought they were high for the cost of the Gift card, but if they are including these types of fees, now I understand.  

[DLRosenberg]

I wonder if we can charge for the physical gift card itself.. like any other merchandise. So we aren't charging. fee but charging for the card. Like at Walgreens when I get the AmEx gift card it's $4.95

[majpepper]

Yeah, we’ve been using Square for ten years. I’ve been fairly happy with their all in one solution for most of our needs. I’ve been willing to overlook all the idiosyncrasies and not-quite-the-solution I needed but good enough, because it worked, it was integrated, and the fee structure was transparent.

This is patently a cash grab. If this decision is not reversed, we will be dropping Square in favor of a new provider within 6 months.

[jthorvaldson]

We already pay almost $300/month to use Square services (Square for Retail, Loyalty, Marketing). To be charged now for selling gift cards? Really? Yeah, that's a no go for us. I feel like we already pay enough in monthly fees. We also have to purchase the gift cards to use not to mention the credit card processing fees for the payment. Keeping track of our gift cards should be done by coding already embedded in the software that we pay a monthly fee for currently. Why exactly does Square need to charge even more fees on top of what we already pay to load a gift card? And even if Square is dead set on charging a load fee, why is it a percentage vs a flat fee? Does a $200 gift card require any more work than a $10 gift card? We are already looking at different POS systems. If Square doesn't re-consider this fee, we will be switching POS systems this year for sure.

[1369Coffeehouse]

I'll second this!  It's absolutely infuriating, atop their usurious gift card pricing!  We're already paying 10x what other gift card makers charge per card.  How many ways can you squeeze us?