2013 brought with it a new retailer checkout fee when using your credit card to buy certain goods and services.

The fee results from a 2012 court settlement – an agreement over electronic payment costs – reached between retailers, nine major banks, and Visa and Master Card.

The court ruling allows retailers to pass their credit card acceptance costs on to consumers in the form of a new fee. Not all merchants will charge this fee – each individual business will set its own policy.

Make sure you know your rights – and the merchant’s responsibilities – before paying a fee to use your credit card! As a consumer, the key elements that you should know about checkout fees are that these new credit card rules started January 27th, 2013, and surcharges are not permitted at all in ten states where state law prohibits them. However, Iowa is not one of those ten states.

Merchants can only change checkout fees on credit card transactions, charging a checkout fee on a debit card transaction is expressly prohibited.  Merchants who decide to levy the fee must post a fee disclosure notice in three places: at the entrance to the establishment; point of sale; and on the receipt.  Merchants cannot levy a surcharge that is higher than the amount they pay the credit card company for the transaction, typically between 1.5 to 3% of the amount charged.

These rules are designed to make sure merchants do not surprise you with a fee at the last minute, or try to hide the fee or overcharge you.

The decision to utilize this new ruling is viewed with mixed emotions in Guthrie County.  Privately owned business are undecided on whether or not to pass this fee on to the consumer while other businesses are waiting to hear from their corporate offices as to the route they will take.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes:

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>