We are already behind in our goal to bring you helpful tips every week…. But that’s okay because here in the DC region, we took a snow day! I know what all of you north of here are thinking, but here we count any snow we get.

In last week’s blog we talked about different ways your store can make money from vendor sales (like charging booth rent or consignment fees). The third of these is charging a credit card processing fee, which – like rent and consignment – is built into Quail. While not as common as the consignment fee, there are enough folks passing on card fees to let us collect some real data. First, let’s look at what stores are charging vendors for card fees:

Across Quail, the majority of booths are charged 0% for card fees – most stores just eat this expense as a “cost of doing business”, or possibly just let it go to simplify their books. If you are not charging zero you’re probably hovering around the 3% rate; if you are charging a card processing fee, that’s the average rate we see. Again, if stores do charge a credit card fee it’s usually just a way to recoup that cost – after all, Square is probably taking close to 3% of your sales.

Now that we have you thinking about credit card fees, what does that actually work out to? If you’re just ‘eating’ the card fee, what would passing on that 3% add to your bottom line? Let’s do some napkin math:

[Trevor]: Yes, even PhDs still do math on napkins. It helps!

The average store right now makes $21,940 in sales every month, 69.35% of which are paid by card. $21,940 x 69.35% x 3% (the average card rate) = $456 in card fees. Not a huge expense, but certainly nothing to sneeze at.

So if you’re looking at that (and not just sneezing at it), and do you want to add credit card fees to your booths – how do you do that? Check out our post from last week where we talk about how to charge consignment fees – the per-booth card fee is right there next to consignment and booth rent. Give it a look!