thread Re: Service Charges Q&A: How can we better serve your business service charge needs? in Archived Discussions (Read Only)

Service Charges Q&A: How can we better serve your business service charge needs?

Tom — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 20:35:10 GMT

Hello Seller Community — as we make our way through January, I'm stoked to have our Commerce Platform team join us again!

This time around, the focus of this Q&A is on all things related to service charges and our product team will address your questions/feedback on Thursday, January 27, at 11am PST / 2pm EST.

The Commerce Platform team manages the service charge product experience, which allows sellers to add a charge to an item or a cart before checkout. They want to know: What are your biggest use cases for service charges? Is auto-application of the charge important for you? What are the biggest gaps or pain points that you're currently encountering with service charges at your business? This discussion will help inform next steps on a wide variety of feature requests that we've received over the years.

A few examples of areas for improvement where we're looking to get feedback include:

Bottle Deposits
Shipping and Delivery Charges
Card Surcharges
Local Fees (e.g. bag fees or San Francisco Healthy SF)
or other Temp Charges you incur.

With these in mind, please share your thoughts on what's most important for your business:

How does the current feature set help your business, or what kind of workarounds do you have to enact to get the necessary result?
What improvements in reporting, application and refunds flow would make your life better?

Click Reply below to share your experience or post a question ahead of time, and we’ll address as many posts as we can on Thursday, January 27th!👇

We are not able to offer tax advice nor are we are not able to address issues related to specific payments, deposits, or account status details in our public forums. If you need assistance on one of those topics, please contact our Customer Success team and they'll be able to take a deeper dive into your account.

Re: Service Charges Q&A: How can we better serve your business service charge needs?

chrissulser — Fri, 21 Jan 2022 01:49:57 GMT

All of my clients have complained about us charging them a "processing fee". I am a specialized Marine mechanic, and I travel to where the vessel is located. All of my work is seasonal, which adds another issue with having to change everything to a monthly plan. Since my clients have consistently complained about the added fee, I just don't charge them for it, but I can't even claim it as a business cost on my taxes. Then I also have the added fee of transferring the money to my business account at the bank. I chose square as my credit card processing because it was easy to use, not complicated, and I knew what fee's I was going to have to pay. Now I'm having to choose a monthly plan, as well as having to pay per transaction, and all with my having to "eat" the fee's without being able to use it as a tax write-off. What else is going to change?

Re: Service Charges Q&A: How can we better serve your business service charge needs?

OwensMarket — Fri, 21 Jan 2022 12:44:43 GMT

the IRS will allow you to claim any and all banking fees you may have. Yes this does include the fee's from Square

Re: Service Charges Q&A: How can we better serve your business service charge needs?

mythicrunning — Fri, 21 Jan 2022 18:16:48 GMT

I use Square for Retail and need to be able to apply a percentage based Re-Stocking Fee to returned/exchanged goods, especially when an exception to our return policy is made (ie outside the return period, refund instead of exchange or store credit, etc). I see that Service Fees are available in Square but that app doesn't handle returns/exchanges as neatly as Square for Retail. Not to stack the deck here, but it seems to me that there should be a single app that has features that can be toggles on/off according to a business' particular needs or subscription with Square. I appreciate the service Square provides and the teams' dedication to continually improving the user experience.

Re: Service Charges Q&A: How can we better serve your business service charge needs?

AnswerS33k3r — Fri, 21 Jan 2022 20:03:00 GMT

Public Holiday Surcharges

It would be wonderful to be able to choose dates and times on a calendar, in advance, and have service charges apply automatically for those particular days ie.. public holidays and other days where there a service charge needs to apply.

Then they automatically disable once the date/ time specified has ended.

This needs to happen for both POS and Online.

Re: Service Charges Q&A: How can we better serve your business service charge needs?

goldstarmower — Sat, 22 Jan 2022 16:53:21 GMT

I run a Small Engine Repair and Service Shop, with on-site and Mobile Services.

It would be nice to have to option to calculate processing fees and charge back to customer on invoices. But then it would no longer be an expense, since the customer covers the cost. Downside is customers do not like to pay processing fees, in addition to shop fees, environmental fees, etc. So, I have simply added the cost of processing into my product and service pricing. By adding 3% to each item, I can recoup my processing fees. This also allows me to deduct those fees from my tax filings as an expense. I have also eliminated my environmental fees by wrapping it into the price of services where this fee is needed. This also helps in advertising, " No added fees" " Rock Solid Pricing" My local competitors get nervous when I do this. 😂

Re: Service Charges Q&A: How can we better serve your business service charge needs?

anniemccauley — Sat, 22 Jan 2022 22:37:25 GMT

It would be nice to be able to use the retail app to give a specific customer a coupon for future use. Plus making exchanges/store credit easier to manage. The ability to use the ecard for an refund is nice but it would be nice to be able to see it on the customers profile.

Re: Service Charges Q&A: How can we better serve your business service charge needs?

GourmetOnWheels — Sun, 23 Jan 2022 01:35:58 GMT

I say Bottle Deposits, Shipping, delivery charges, bag fees will all come in handy. But Card Fees (credit/debit, Apple Pay) are illegal in some states. In CA it is legal, but if you on clear signage mark that cash customers get a discount then it is legal, just like how gas stations do it in CA

René

Re: Service Charges Q&A: How can we better serve your business service charge needs?

IndigoMoon — Mon, 24 Jan 2022 00:39:30 GMT

When I add new items to the website, sales tax should be automatically applied, instead of having to go to "Sales Tax" and manually select it for new items.

Re: Service Charges Q&A: How can we better serve your business service charge needs?

leecleans — Mon, 24 Jan 2022 13:55:11 GMT

I run a cleaning business, and have thus far used Square for my appointments. My biggest issues are card processing fees, and a way to charge these fees to the customer. In addition, recently most of the features that keep me using Square are now in a subscription package that costs money. So, in addition to card processing fees, I need to either pay a monthly fee to use the features or find a different app/program all together. Considering the hefty charge for the subscriptions, I will be looking for another app/program.

Re: Service Charges Q&A: How can we better serve your business service charge needs?

Sportland — Mon, 24 Jan 2022 21:06:17 GMT

We apply a 3% service charge to one variably priced item in our store. I would like if square would have the option to add a % service charge to that 1 item and not to the whole shopping cart.

Re: Service Charges Q&A: How can we better serve your business service charge needs?

PartyManiaMD — Mon, 24 Jan 2022 22:42:52 GMT

Unless I'm missing something Service charge is useless for Bag Taxes depending on the state. In Maryland we have a $0.05 per bag tax which is a variable based on how many bags they want. Square service charge doesn't allow more than one per transaction which means I'd have to set up multiple service charges of $0.05 for one bag, $0.10 for 2 bags, and so forth and so on.

Currently I use an item called Bag Tax and don't apply tax to it.

It would be nice if I could have a service charge for bag taxes of $0.05 and that would let the cashier select the quantity to be applied to the check.

Re: Service Charges Q&A: How can we better serve your business service charge needs?

wildflourgrocer — Mon, 24 Jan 2022 22:50:38 GMT

Interesting you have this problem. Ours is the opposite. I would like sales tax to Not be automatically applied as most of our items are non-taxable and it is always on unless we remember to go in and toggle it off. So we need a way to choose whether we want sales tax to be automatically applied or not. Maybe it already exists and we just do not know about it?

Re: Service Charges Q&A: How can we better serve your business service charge needs?

trendingupward — Tue, 25 Jan 2022 00:39:56 GMT

It would be nice if the service charge was auto applied if the person pays with a credit card or when the pay with a credit card under a certain threshold. Currently we have to remember to enable it whenever they are under our $10 minimum.

Re: Service Charges Q&A: How can we better serve your business service charge needs?

pnhcomp — Tue, 25 Jan 2022 16:19:55 GMT

I am wondering how to offer Square installments or Square financing to my customers on an item that I sell on the online platform? Are they able to choose this when they checkout and I just can't see it on my end? Do I have to set this up? Not really any information on this through the website or online.

Re: Service Charges Q&A: How can we better serve your business service charge needs?

ENGBeauty — Thu, 27 Jan 2022 01:48:42 GMT

Would love to see the Loyalty program change a bit

I'm currently being charged every time a customer shops plus if they use a rewards.
It be better to only charge the time the customer shops per day which sets us back when they shop and shop again and then claim a reward. We are now charged 3 - 4 times per day for that customer and after 499 uses we enter the Tier 2 pricing.

Also, I would love to see discount section improve a bit. For example - discounts from loyalty customers to expire in less than 3 months, Maybe a week or days. Also to allow the discount to have more options to allow us to track down which sales, coupon codes work more in our favor.

Re: Service Charges Q&A: How can we better serve your business service charge needs?

ber — Thu, 27 Jan 2022 14:17:12 GMT

I can only address the areas specific to my business:

Shipping charges...Since 2016, I have used a standard, flat-fixed fee of $4.99 for each online purchase without regard to the number of items purchased. It has probably hurt me on the smaller orders and equally on the larger orders simply due to ever-increasing shipping charges. I am considering switching to actual shipping costs shortly down the road. Actual shipping costs will definitely be the norm when I open up sales and marketing in Canada and the U.K.

Event Space Expense...We participate in more than 40 Art, Craft, and Vintage Market events in any calendar year. I've seen the average event space fee increase by an additional 50% over this two-year-long COVID period. I am amazed how new and smaller events are charging $100 like it was a standard. Be aware that there are also "rain or shine" clauses. Not to mention, we also need to worry about "event cancelation outside the promoters' area of control."

When a customer asks for a discount, particularly on a single item, they are obviously not aware of what we face in today's marketplace. I address that by indicating my only discounting occurs with purchases of three or more items.

Re: Submit your feedback: How can we better serve your business service charge needs?

kbojda — Thu, 27 Jan 2022 14:27:25 GMT

Hi Tom,

Thank you for putting this out to the community.

Would love to have a way to charge for things like bottle or jar deposits and then be able to issue a refund when they bring them back and do not have a purchase.

Again... thank you!

With gratitude,

Kevin

Re: Service Charges Q&A: How can we better serve your business service charge needs?

mariallama — Thu, 27 Jan 2022 15:08:16 GMT

We're a dine-in restaurant that also fulfills to-go orders. We charge a 20% service charge for dine-in and a 15% service charge for to-go. We use Square for Restaurants for dine-in where we use the automated gratuity for the 20% service charge, but for to-go, we have to use the regular Square POS app where we have to manually add the 15% service charge. It would be ideal to be able to manage orders in one POS app, ideally where the automated gratuity changes depending on the "For Here" or "Pickup" settings. Square for Restaurants is only capable of managing one automated gratuity rate at a time. It would be ideal for this and the Service Charges in the Square Dashboard to work together.

Re: Service Charges Q&A: How can we better serve your business service charge needs?

divyar — Thu, 27 Jan 2022 19:05:12 GMT

@chrissulser

Thank you for the feedback. I see your frustration with not being able to pass on the fee to your clients. I am interested to know how we can help you make this cost a tax write off. Can you elaborate on the gap here?