I recently received the email with subject “Upcoming pricing changes to Square Gift Cards” that said in part:
For developers and partners that have integrated with our Gift Cards API, this means that the load fee will be charged to a seller for any API call that adjusts or otherwise updates a Square gift card’s balance, including instances where a 3P developer uses an external payments provider to process payments but uses Square Gift Cards to manage reporting or accounting.
In the interest of transparency, I would like to understand if ALL balance affecting transactions will result in fees, or only some of them.
Is Square able to indicate which of the following gift_card_activity GiftCardActivityType transactions are subject to the 2.5% fee?
ACTIVATE
LOAD
REDEEM
CLEAR_BALANCE
DEACTIVATE
ADJUST_INCREMENT
ADJUST_DECREMENT
REFUND
UNLINKED_ACTIVITY_REFUND
(I omitted the GiftCardActivityType values that are not available to the API).
If fee determination is based on more than just the GiftCardActivityType then please explain.
Are you saying that API refunds are treated differently than Register/Dashboard/etc refunds?
And, the FAQ also says that only balance increasing transactions will be subject to this fee, so I would expect that REDEEM and ADJUST_DECREMENT, etc. transactions would NOT be subject to the fee.
Square should add information about the 2.5% gift card fee to the developer docs. We built a feature that plugs into gift cards in late 2023 which turned out to be terrible timing because the 2.5% fee more or less kills the feature. That was unlucky for us. Now the fee exists and developers should be made aware that there is a signifcant new expense associated with gift card loading activities.
