Ecommerce checkout in Australia

The headline everywhere is that surcharges are banned. That is roughly the outcome and not at all the mechanism, and the mechanism matters because it tells you who to ask when you have a question about your own store.

What the Reserve Bank of Australia did was remove its own prohibition on no-surcharge rules. Until now the Bank stopped the card networks from forbidding merchants to surcharge. With that prohibition lifted from 1 October 2026, the networks were free to forbid it, and eftpos, Mastercard and Visa each announced they would. American Express, which the Bank does not formally regulate, announced the same separately. The Bank puts its own position plainly: it does not directly regulate merchants, and merchants deal with their acquirer or payments provider.

The practical consequence for a store owner is that the rule reaches you through your payment provider rather than through a regulator. Several providers have said they may simply disable the surcharging function on that date. If your checkout has a card fee in it today, the safe assumption is that it stops working rather than that somebody writes to you about it.

There is one timing trap worth knowing if you invoice. The Bank states that if a card payment is made on or after 1 October 2026, surcharging may no longer be available even where the invoice was issued earlier. So an invoice raised in September with thirty day terms is a payment made in October, and the fee on it may not survive.

The change is narrower than the coverage suggests, and the narrowness is useful. It applies to a surcharge added because a customer paid by card. It does not touch the other things people commonly call surcharges.

Weekend surcharges, public holiday surcharges, booking fees and service fees are all outside it. So are the fees your own provider charges you: terminal rental, transaction processing and the rest are fees for a service you buy, not surcharges you levy, and they are unaffected. Your cost of accepting cards is unchanged. Only your ability to itemise it to the customer has gone.

There is no general exemption, and card payments between businesses are not exempt either unless a network or a law provides one. Whether any exemptions exist at all is a decision for each card network rather than for the Bank, which is the second reason your provider is the right first call.

One option survives intact and is worth using. The Bank confirms that discounts for particular payment methods remain allowed, and that removing the prohibition on no-surcharge rules is not intended to prevent them. So if you want buyers to use a cheaper method, you can still make that worth their while. The incentive simply has to be shaped as a reward rather than as a penalty, which is, for what it is worth, the version buyers have always preferred.

The surcharge change removes one line from one screen. It does nothing about the fault that costs Australian stores far more, which is that the number a buyer first sees and the number they are eventually asked to pay are not the same number.

Delivery is where this almost always happens. A buyer picks an item, decides it is worth the price on the product page, adds it, and only then learns what it costs to send to Perth. The order does not fail because the delivery charge is unreasonable. It fails because it arrived late, after the buyer had already settled the question of price in their head, and being asked to settle it twice reads as a trick even when nothing dishonest has occurred.

The Australian complication is real and is not an excuse. Distances here make flat national shipping genuinely hard to cost, and a store that pretends otherwise either overcharges most of the country or quietly loses money on the far half of it. The answer is not to invent a simple number. It is to show the real one sooner: a postcode estimator on the product page, a clear threshold above which delivery is included, or a stated range with the honest reason for it.

The same logic applies to anything else mandatory. Australian consumer law expects a price shown to a consumer to be a single total figure, prominently displayed, rather than a base figure with unavoidable additions revealed later, and the Bank itself points merchants to the competition regulator's guidance on pricing displays when they ask how to handle the absorbed cost. The commercial argument and the legal expectation point the same way, which is not always true and is worth taking advantage of when it is.

A checkout step is not free. Each one is a place a buyer can stop, so each one has to be paying for itself. The test is simple and uncomfortable: what would break if this step were not here?

Two of those deserve a caveat, because the advice is often given absolutely and should not be. Guest checkout is right for most stores and wrong for some: if you sell to trade accounts with negotiated pricing, the account is the product and hiding it helps nobody. And a short form is not automatically a better form. A missing field that causes a failed delivery costs more than the field would have.

What is universal is the ordering. Cost before commitment, then the smallest set of questions that lets you actually fulfil the order. Where a store has these two right, the individual screens matter much less than the industry suggests. This is the part of a build we spend the most time on in our ecommerce website design work, because it is the part that is expensive to change afterwards.