Ping charge of 1.95%

The 0.8% cap only applies to the interchange fee. That is one component of credit card charges, and is the fee that is charged between the two banks involved in the transaction whenever the card is used. There are also other components that make up the total charge for using a credit card.

Although 1.95% is relatively high compared to what many others are charging, there is no specific maximum legal fee, they just shouldn't be profiting from the charges.

As a guide, Consumer NZ considers a total charge above 2.5% to be potentially excessive, but it's open to interpretation. Anyone attempting to make a profit out of the charges can be reported to the Commerce Commission. The merchant would need to be able to justify the charge that they are making and demonstrate that it isn't excessive.

Interestingly, there's a new story on Stuff today about the Commerce Commission currently taking an active interest in companies that may be making a profit out of credit card surcharges. They quote the example of 2degrees, who have recently reduced their fee from 1.75% to 1%.

They haven't yet ruled out introducing additional regulations to limit the fees that companies can charge their customers, but they currently seem to be focusing on educating companies on their obligation to not profit from these fees.

It will be very interesting to see how this develops.

I would imagine it's a bit different in Trademe's case as the buyer does not pay any fees to use their credit card and in fact Ping does not require a credit card to be used as you can pay using a debit card or straight from your bank acc, which is what I do. Sellers can choose to accept payments via the Ping buyer protection system, or not. It's an optional service.