Feature request: add a percentage-based fee or surcharge to sale price

[mikesclub]

This has been discussed in several other threads, but there doesn't seem to be a real workable solution.

I need to be able to add a percentage to the sale price for some customers. In my case, we are a membership club. Our posted prices are member prices. But we also sell to non-members for +20%. 

Right now, I have to use a calculator to figure the additional charge, and then add that as a separate item I call "non-member surcharge". This works, but its a workaround. We shouldn't have to use hacks and workarounds to do basic things.

There are other workarounds, like creating variations for every item in my store, or using the tax feature to add the additional charge (which I then have to explain to customers that it's not really a tax). But again, these are all hacks.

I'm pretty sure that all this would require is to modify the code that handles discounts, to allow for adding a percentage rather than deducting a percentage.

Adding surcharges or additional fees is a pretty common thing in business. Please add this feature as soon as possible. Thanks so much.

[GlassJudy]

I would suggest that you use the non-member's price as the default price, then apply a discount each time a member purchases that item.  For example, assume you're selling an item currently priced at $150 for a member.  At 20% markup for non-members, their price would be $150 x 1.2 = $180.  If you use this as your default (non-member) price, then you'd discount that by 16.67% for your members, which comes back to $150 for members.  There are two reasons I suggest for doing it this way:

1. Your members would always see a discount on their receipts, reminding them and reinforcing their good feelings about being a member.
2. You only need to enter one discount: the 16.67%, it works for every price in your inventory, and it's fairly easy to implement at checkout time.

One drawback is that for the majority of your items, both the member's and non-member's prices wouldn't work out to round numbers: if the current member's price is $74, for example, the new default price for non-members would be $88.80 (and it gets worse if your prices aren't set at whole dollars,) but that is probably happening now with your price structure anyway.

I'm not saying this is a perfect solution, especially since you have already posted your prices at the member's level, which means you'd need to re-post them at a higher level which isn't a popular thing to do - either for members or non-members.

NOTE: No matter how you resolve this I would strongly advise you against using the tax feature, as that creates a record of you charging for a 'tax' that isn't really a tax.  If you ever got audited, and you haven't been reporting and paying that 'tax', you'd be in a bad position with your tax authorities.  Use anything except a tax to increase your price for non-members.