02/10/2026
📢 IMPORTANT PAYMENT UPDATE
From 1 October, Upspec Steel Buildings will no longer accept credit or debit card payments for project invoices. Project invoices will need to be paid by bank transfer.
While banning card surcharges sounds great in theory, there’s one small problem. The card processing fees haven’t disappeared.
Someone still has to pay them.
For small businesses, those costs either have to be absorbed or built into pricing. So instead of the person choosing to pay by card covering the fee, businesses will inevitably have to increase prices to recover those costs.
That means everyone ends up paying more, even customers paying by cash or bank transfer.
At Upspec, our project invoices can be tens of thousands of dollars. Absorbing hundreds sometimes thousands of dollars in processing fees on individual payments simply isn’t realistic, and we’re not going to increase everyone’s prices just to cover the cost of customers choosing to pay by card.
Even the ato has had to cancel credit card payments as they can’t absorb the fees, yet private small businesses are expected to somehow absorb these costs.
So does banning surcharges actually make things cheaper? Or does it just bury the fee in the price of everything you buy?
Brilliant, right? 👏
If you have a problem with losing the option to pay your Upspec project invoice by card, feel free to take it up with Albo. 🇦🇺
