Credit card processing and merchant services in Quebec

Section 224(c) of the Consumer Protection Act bars a merchant from charging a higher price than the one advertised, and the advertised price must include the total amount the consumer has to pay. The Office de la protection du consommateur applies this to payment methods directly: you may not charge consumers a fee for paying by debit or credit card, and telling them beforehand does not make the fee legal. The only amounts you can add are those a law or regulation requires you to collect from the consumer for a public authority, such as sales tax.

That covers Interac too. The acquirer-applied Interac fee of up to $0.25 that Interac's rules allow elsewhere in Canada is not an option with Quebec consumers.

Sales in Quebec carry the 5% GST and the 9.975% QST, a combined 14.975%. Revenu Québec calculates the QST on the selling price excluding the GST, so the two taxes are worked out side by side rather than stacked. On a $200 sale, that's $10.00 of GST and $19.95 of QST.

Section 57 of the Charter of the French language says invoices, receipts, acquittances and other documents of the same nature must be drawn up in French. Check that your terminals, POS and invoicing software can produce French receipts before you go live.

We did not find official guidance on whether the rule extends to on-screen prompts on a payment terminal, so confirm with the Office québécois de la langue française if that matters for your setup.

Restaurant operators subject to Revenu Québec's mandatory billing measures must send their transaction data through a certified sales recording system that communicates with the WEB-SRM, and give every customer a bill produced by that system. Remunerated passenger transportation services covered by the measures, such as taxis, must always give customers a bill.

Your card terminal sits beside these systems, so confirm it works with your certified setup before you buy.