Minimum charges
Under the General tab in your Planroom Settings there are two different minimums you can set for your planroom:
Order Pricing - Minimum Order Price
Setting a minimum price for print orders is straightforward. Enter an amount (typically around $5 or 10), and we'll ensure that all print orders placed on your planroom meet this minimum.
If a customer goes to start an order that doesn't meet the minimum, they will see a notice on the shopping cart page:
The rationale behind a minimum print order amount is your overhead. If a customer orders a single plan page that would normally cost $1.50, consider the steps involved: You have to pay a production person to fulfill the order, spend time packing a box for shipping, generate an invoice in your accounting software, and so on. All of these things add a certain amount of overhead to every print order. A minimum print order price ensures you have your hard costs covered even for small orders.
Download Pricing - Minimum Credit Card Charge
The minimum credit card charge affects downloads, and works quite differently from the print order minimum.
The credit card processor Stripe charges you a flat $0.30 per transaction (in addition to the percentage fee). A minimum credit card charge is employed to avoid lots of these flat fees. If you are selling individual PDF downloads for $1.00 each for example, and a customer wants to download a single PDF, you're losing 30% just to the Stripe transaction fee.
If you set a minimum credit card charge to, say, $5.00 then that same customer would have to put $5.00 on their card upfront just to download that single $1.00 PDF. However, here's the difference between Credit Card and order minimums: The customer gets to keep the remaining $4.00 as a credit on their account for future downloads.
This is explained to your customer during the download process:
Your customer could come back the next day and download another $1.00 PDF, and this time they wouldn't have to pay with a credit card. Instead $1.00 would be automatically subtracted from their credit balance. Once their credit balance is too low to cover a download amount, they would then have to enter their credit card details and once again pay your minimum charge amount.
Can I make the credit card minimum work the same as the print order minimum?
No. Print orders create overhead for you, with hard costs you need to cover, whereas Downloads do not. Apart from the transaction fee, you have no costs at all for fulfilling a download! It happens entirely without a need for your involvement - That's why the download minimum leaves a credit balance for future downloads, while the print order minimum applies entirely to a print order as it's placed.