Provender Credit Card Fees

Provender has a surcharge on purchases made with a Credit or Debit card from their Vending Machines. The surcharge is generally 25c per transaction and not a certain percentage of the purchase amount. This 25c transaction fee does not cover the full transaction costs we are charged for each transaction. As we are not passing on the full cost of the Credit Card processing charges we are not contravening the Competition and Consumer Amendment (Payment Surcharges) Act 2016 which became law in February 2016.

Credit Card processing for vending machines is quite different from the Credit Card processing usually done in normal retail shops. There are a number of areas that are quite different from normal retail credit card processing:

• Special equipment is required to interface to a vending machine and any equipment requires special certification which is very costly to obtain.
• There are very few suppliers of this specialised equipment and low volume production so the equipment costs are significantly more expensive than standard retail EFTPOS terminals.
• The equipment suppliers take a charge on each transaction that goes through their equipment which doesn’t normally happen in retail..
• There are charges applied to each transaction by the company that provides the gateway for the transaction to the bank.
• The banks themselves charge a fee for processing the actual transaction. The percentage is significantly higher for these “low value” transactions than normal retail transactions – often more than 3 times the amount normally charged to do the transaction.
• Because the transactions from vending machines are for very small amounts some of the charges are levied as a “cost per transaction” rather than a straight percentage of the transaction value as is done normally in retail.