Surcharging still a hot issue for consumers

Payment card surcharges remain unpopular with consumers, with a new survey showing 93 per cent of people would like to see them removed.

Advisory group Retail Doctor commissioned RDG Insights to survey 1120 adults on the subject. Ninety per cent said they were more likely to give a business repeat business if they were not surcharged and 30 per cent said they had abandoned online purchases when faced with a surcharge.

Surcharging is widely disliked, even though the Reserve Bank reports that consumers pay surcharges on only a relatively small number of card payments.

According to an RBA consumer payments survey issued in June last year, consumers paid surcharges on 4.1 per cent of their card payments. The median value of surcharges paid was 1.8 per cent.

While two per cent of card payments at the point of sale involved a surcharge, 13 per cent of remote card payments involved a surcharge.

"Based on other information about the range of merchant service fees, surcharges up to around these levels would not seem obviously at odds with the card acceptance costs of many merchants," the RBA said.

"However, card surcharges were distributed across a relatively wide range, with a small proportion of reported surcharges being ten per cent or more of the payment value."

Among other findings of the RDG Insights survey, 44 per cent said business surcharged whatever amount they wanted and 43 per cent said they were left with a bad impression of a business that surcharged.

Twenty five per cent said they were unlikely to return to a business that surcharged and 20 per cent said they had complained about a surcharge.