From 1 October, card surcharging ends.
For retailers who currently pass card costs on to customers, that is a real change to the maths. The cost does not disappear. It moves onto your side of the ledger.
We have been working on this for members.
newsXpress has negotiated a new EFTPOS arrangement designed to reduce what members pay to accept card payments. What each store saves will depend on its card mix, its transaction volumes and what it pays today, so we are happy to sit down with any member and work through their own numbers.
There is one point we want to make plainly.
newsXpress retains no margin from this arrangement. None. Every bit of the benefit flows through to the member.
That was a deliberate decision. It would have been easy to take a clip. Plenty of groups do. We took the view that the whole purpose of negotiating as a group is to give members buying power they could not access alone. Skimming from that would undercut the point.
Payments are one of those costs that drift. A rate gets set when the terminal is installed and then nobody looks at it again for years. Meanwhile the market moves. Many retailers are paying more than they need to and have no easy way to tell.
The surcharge ban makes this worth attention now rather than later. Once you are absorbing the cost yourself, the rate you pay goes straight to your bottom line.
A few sensible steps before October.
Check what you are actually paying, all in. That means the merchant service fee, terminal rental and any monthly charges, not just the headline rate. Look at your card mix, since debit and credit behave differently and the balance varies a lot between stores.
Review any surcharging signage, menus and online checkout wording so nothing is left in place after 30 September. Little things get missed. A sticker on a terminal. A line on a website checkout page.
Then take a proper look at whether your current arrangement is still competitive. If it has not been reviewed in a few years, it probably is not.
Members can talk to our head office team about the newsXpress arrangement and what it would mean for their store.
This is the kind of work that is not glamorous. It does not make for an exciting shop floor. It simply leaves more money in the business at the end of each month, which is its own reward.
If you are a newsagent weighing up your options for the year ahead, we would be glad to talk.
