Payment method fees¶
Most external payment providers like PayPal or Stripe charge substantial fees for your service. In general, you have two options to deal with this:
Pay the fees yourself
Add the fees to your customer’s total
The choice totally depends on you and what your customers expect from you. Option two might be appropriate if you offer different payment methods and want to encourage your customers to use the ones that come you cheaper, but you might also decide to go for option one to make it easier for customers who don’t have the option.
Warning
Please note that EU Directive 2015/2366 bans surcharging payment fees for most common payment methods within the European Union. Depending on the payment method, this might affect selling to consumers only or to business customers as well. Depending on your country, this legislation might already be in place or become relevant from January 2018 the latest. This is not legal advice. If in doubt, consult a lawyer or refrain from charging payment fees.
If you go for the first option (as you should in the EU), you can just leave the payment fee fields in pretix’ settings empty.
If you go for the second option, you can configure pretix to charge the payment method fees to your user. You can define both an absolute fee as well as a percental fee based on the order total. If you do so, there are two different ways in which pretix can calculate the fee. Normally, it is fine to just go with the default setting, but in case you are interested, here are all the details:
Payment fee calculation¶
If you configure a fee for a payment method, there are two possible ways for us to calculate this. Let’s assume that your payment provider, e.g. PayPal, charges you 5 % fees and you want to charge your users the same 5 %, such that for a ticket with a list price of 100 € you will get your full 100 €.
Method A: Calculate the fee from the subtotal and add it to the bill.
For a ticket price of 100 €, this will lead to the following calculation:
Ticket price
100.00 €
pretix calculates the fee as 5 % of 100 €
+5.00 €
Subtotal that will be paid by the customer
105.00 €
PayPal calculates its fee as 5 % of 105 €
-5.25 €
End total that is on your bank account
99.75 €
Method B (default): Calculate the fee from the total value including the fee.
For a ticket price of 100 €, this will lead to the following calculation:
Ticket price
100.00 €
pretix calculates the fee as 100/(100 - 5) % of 100 €
+5.26 €
Subtotal that will be paid by the customer
105.26 €
PayPal calculates its fee as 5 % of 105 €
-5.26 €
End total that is on your bank account
100.00 €
Due to the various rounding steps performed by pretix and by the payment provider, the end total on your bank account might still vary by one cent.