Thrift and Consignment Store Payments

"All sales final" is allowed, and the rule says where it has to appear

Almost every thrift, consignment and resale shop restricts returns, and the card rules permit that. What they do not permit is restricting them quietly. Visa's Core Rule 1.5.4.14 states that a merchant may establish its own credit refund policy but must disclose it as specified in Section 5.4.2.5, Disclosure to Cardholders of Return, Refund, and Cancellation Policies. For card-present environment transactions, the disclosure must be at the point of transaction before the cardholder completes the transaction, or on the front of the transaction receipt — and if the disclosure is on the transaction receipt or in a separate contract, it must be accompanied by a space for the cardholder to indicate acceptance of the merchant's policy. For an electronic commerce merchant selling the same stock online, the disclosure must appear during the sequence of pages before final checkout with a click-to-accept button, checkbox or other acknowledgement, and it may be a link to a separate page only if that link forms part of the acknowledgement. For card-absent transactions that are not electronic commerce, disclosure goes through mail, email or text message. A sign by the door is not, on its own, any of those things. The cheap fix is a printed line above the signature area on the receipt and a visible notice at the point of transaction, so the disclosure happens before the sale completes rather than after.

You cannot contract a customer out of a chargeback

The second half of Section 5.4.2.5 is the sentence that decides how much your policy is actually worth: a merchant must not require a cardholder to waive the right to dispute a transaction with the issuer. So a correctly disclosed no-refund policy is a defence you can put in front of an acquirer, and it is a term you can enforce against a customer, but it is not a shield that stops a dispute being filed. The dispute conditions a resale shop meets in practice are 13.3, not as described or defective merchandise or services, and 13.1, merchandise or services not received, where you hold items for collection or ship. For used goods, 13.3 is the live one, and the defence is evidentiary rather than contractual. What wins is a description of condition recorded at the point of sale — a grade on the ticket, a photograph attached to the item record, a note of a named flaw — plus the disclosed policy and the signed acceptance. What loses is an argument that the customer should have looked more carefully. Build condition grading into the intake process, because the record you need is created when the item is taken in, not when the dispute arrives.

Consignment payouts are a separate money flow, and should look like one

A consignment shop is holding other people's money. The sale settles into your merchant account in full; the consignor's share leaves later on your own terms. That is a bookkeeping arrangement rather than a card one, and the card rules have nothing to say about it — which is exactly why it goes wrong. Two practical rules. First, keep the consignor ledger inside the POS rather than in a spreadsheet, so that the item record, the sale, the split and the payout are one chain. When a dispute arrives months later, the question is always what the item was and what it sold for, and a POS that cannot answer that is the reason the case is lost. Second, do not use the card terminal as a payout mechanism. Visa's rules state that a merchant must not process a credit transaction receipt without having completed a previous retail transaction with the same cardholder, and must not accept payment from a cardholder for the purpose of depositing funds to the cardholder's account. Pay consignors by cheque, transfer or cash against a signed ledger entry — never by refunding a card that never bought anything.

The economics of a $9 basket

Resale is a fixed-cost business at the terminal. The table below is the card-present ladder at a resale ticket size, effective April 18, 2026, and the thing to notice is what the cents do. On a $9 sale, the $0.15 in CPS/Retail, Debit is worth 1.67% on its own, which is more than double the percentage component. That is why the small-ticket programs exist and why your own per-item charges — authorisation fees, per-item markup, batch fees — matter far more than the rate you were quoted. It is also why a card minimum comes up in every conversation in this category; the published federal position is that a minimum on credit cards is permitted up to a stated threshold, and the card rules and your state's law both bear on how you may apply it, so check the current position rather than copying another shop's sign.

Cash back, donations and the other things at a resale counter

Two side channels are worth getting right. Cash back is available to any face-to-face retailer and it can reduce the cash a small shop has to bank, but it has conditions: Visa's Section 5.8.1.4 requires the transaction to be online, completed as a retail transaction in a face-to-face environment effective April 18, 2026, and to contain a PIN or consumer device cardholder verification — with a PIN specifically required in the US region. The cash-back portion must be uniquely identified within the transaction amount, and a merchant must not process a credit refund for the cash-back component. Table 5-15 sets the US limit at USD 200 on debit and prepaid cards, with merchants free to set a lower limit at their discretion. Donations are the other one. If the shop is a charity outlet taking donations alongside sales, those are a different transaction type with their own interchange treatment — Visa lists the Charity programs at 1.35% + $0.05 — and mixing a donation into a merchandise sale on the register makes both harder to reconcile and harder to defend. Ring them separately.

A short list for the agreement and the counter

On the agreement: interchange-plus pricing with the interchange shown, the per-item and batch charges stated in figures, the term and renewal mechanism, the early termination amount and its calculation, and who owns the terminal. On the counter: the return policy visible at the point of transaction and printed on the front of the receipt with a space to accept; condition grading captured at intake; the consignor ledger inside the POS; PIN debit live if you want cash back; and donations rung separately. PCI DSS applies to every merchant that accepts payment cards regardless of size — the PCI Security Standards Council publishes the merchant guidance and the validated device listings, and the self-assessment questionnaire type follows from how you accept payments, so a shop that also sells online is in a different position from one that does not. None of that is expensive. All of it is easier to put in place now than to reconstruct when a dispute lands.

About the rate tables on this page: Visa is the only card network that publishes a public US merchant interchange schedule, so the rate tables on this site are Visa-only. Mastercard, American Express and Discover do not publish an equivalent US merchant schedule, and their rates are neither shown above nor implied by these figures. Ask your processor for the rates that apply to each network on your account.