determine whether client is paying by credit or debit card

[apt763]

Hello,

 

My clients wants to charge a commission to customers paying by credit card, but no commission if they pay by debit card. How do I determine whether customers are paying by debit or credit card before the payment? I'm using Realex for Global Iris.

 

Many thanks for any help.

 

Kind regards.

[Guest]

@@apt763

 

With the introduction of Visa Debit and Mastercard Debit, there is no way of knowing if the card is going to the customers line of credit or if the funds are coming straight from their bank account. Therefore, your client wont be able to apply a surcharge.

 

 

 

Chris

[Bob Terveuren]

Hi

 

You need to grab the first six digits from the card number (the IIN previously known as the BIN) - many of those will identify the bank and the card type for you - you can then either subscribe to http://www.binbase.com/ and run a quick check there and apply the surcharge if required or else run a check against a local store of numbers (either obtained from binbase or else scraped from the web and manually input to your database)

 

BIN is $500 a year per site so that's a lot of surcharges - otherwise you could manually setup a database but it's not going to be exhaustive

[MrPhil]

Whatever payment system you're using, make sure they don't forbid you to charge extra (surcharge) for using credit cards or something else. Also check pertinent consumer protection laws that apply to you. Adding a surcharge, even if you tell the customer up front, may be forbidden by law in some places and by the payment system in others, so check first. If you don't like paying extra for customers using certain payment methods, you may have to either drop those methods or raise prices across the board to pay the extra fees.

[♥GLWalker]

My clients wants to charge a commission to customers paying by credit card

 

Your client needs to write it off as the cost of doing business ~ Does he happen to squeak when he walks?

[MrPhil]

If your client insists on charging extra for CC purchases, assuming it's allowed by law and payment processor, they'll get a bad reputation and lose sales. I won't do business at a gas station that advertises a low price and then in tiny letters "CASH", and once I've pulled in, charges me 10 cents a gallon extra to pay at the pump with a CC. Most people want to pay by CC, so unless your client is in some niche where CCs are uncommon (say, teenagers ordering stuff), it's a bad idea to alienate so many potential customers. They just need to accept it as an overhead expense and set their prices accordingly.

 

If, after explaining all that, they absolutely insist on surcharging CC purchases (or you lose any further work with them), I suppose it can be done. Unfortunately, you may not know until the payment page, which means you will have to go back and recalculate the total (with the surcharge). To be legal, you'll need to put notice of this well before the customer gets to the payment page in checkout. Maybe you can sweeten it by pricing in the CC overhead (surcharge), and offer a discount for non-CC payments such as debit cards. I presume your client is aware that, like credit cards, there are transaction fees for debit card usage.