How merchants and platforms on Checkout.com can take a more flexible approach to surcharging

Surcharging is often treated as a simple merchant decision: a business wants to stop absorbing credit card fees, so it passes the cost to the cardholder at the point of sale. In practice, it is more complicated than that. 

For merchants, the challenge is how to recover eligible payment costs without creating operational overhead or a poor customer experience, and while managing multiple complex regulations. For platforms, the challenge is even broader: how to support many merchants, each with different configurations, geographies, and payment flows, without building and maintaining all of that logic internally.

That’s where Yeeld’s partnership with Checkout.com comes in. Together, we’re enabling a more flexible approach to surcharging that works across both direct merchant and multi-merchant environments.

Why surcharging is not a one-size-fits-all 

Payment cost recovery sits at the intersection of pricing, payments infrastructure, regulations, and customer experience.

What works for one business may not work for another. Some want a straightforward way to recover eligible card acceptance costs within an existing payment flow. Others need more configurability based on their business model. And for businesses serving multiple merchants, complexity grows quickly.

That is why surcharging is not just about turning on a fee. It is about implementing a payment cost recovery strategy in a way that works for the business strategically.

What this can look like for merchants and platforms on Checkout.com

For direct merchants, the goal is often straightforward: recover eligible payment costs without having to build and maintain surcharge logic from scratch.

Platforms have a different problem. A platform may support dozens or hundreds of merchant accounts, each with different rate structures, geographies, and payment flows. Some merchants may want to surcharge. Others may not. Some may operate across multiple states or regions – creating challenges at scale.

What platform-ready means in practice

Through Yeeld, Checkout.com platforms can utilize infrastructure built for multi-merchant environments:

• Per-merchant configurability, so different merchants can have different surcharge rules without separate custom builds
• White-labeled checkout experiences, so surcharging can appear as part of the platform’s product experience rather than a third-party add-on
• A foundation for embedding surcharging into a broader payments offering

This is where surcharging becomes more than just a cost recovery tool. For platforms, it can also support a broader payments strategy by helping improve merchant economics, strengthen the product offering, and create new monetization opportunities.

What Checkout.com customers can access through Yeeld

Through the partnership, Checkout.com customers can implement Yeeld’s Surcharging API, a real-time surcharge calculation engine integrated alongside Checkout.com’s payment infrastructure

Together, Yeeld and Checkout.com give merchants and platforms a more flexible way to approach payment cost recovery within the payments infrastructure they already use.

Available now

Yeeld’s integration with Checkout.com is available immediately for joint customers, supporting both direct merchant integrations and platform use cases.

If you are using Checkout.com and want to recover payment costs more effectively or if you are a platform looking to offer surcharging as a feature to your merchants, we would love to talk.

Reach out at sales@theyeeld.com or visit www.theyeeld.com.