Convenience Fees

This article will explain the convenience fees within the ePayment Center module.

Important Notes 

• CivicPlus no longer supports the provisioning of the Legacy ePayment Center payment gateways, such as Heartland, Elavon, and PayPal. All new payment gateway setups must use CivicPlus Pay, with one of the approved partners or supported gateways.
• CivicPlus Pay is CivicPlus’ preferred utility application where you can create a secure, Payment Card Industry (PCI)-compliant payment gateway for your online services. 
• The Convenience Fee is a module-wide parameter and cannot be set up per individual form.

What is a Convenience Fee?

A convenience fee is not related to the cost to process the payments, which varies depending on the Payment Processor. A convenience fee is an extra charge levied for the privilege or convenience of paying for a product or service by way of a credit card when paying by credit card is not ordinarily accepted.

For example, if you pay for your taxes online by credit card, expect to pay a small convenience fee.

Setup

• Convenience fees are set to a 7% default value.
• The 7% default value can be adjusted.
• To adjust the convenience fee value, contact Support with the percentage you prefer.
• The convenience fee value cannot be less than 2.5% or more than 7.5%.
  
  Note: The fee that is charged will either be $2.00 or this percentage, based on which amount is greater.
• The convenience fee cannot vary for different types of payments. For example, the convenience fee charged for checks cannot be different than the convenience fee charged for credit cards.