Pricing

Partners → Pricing is what a transaction costs a merchant, and therefore what it earns the platform.

How a fee is resolved

Most-specific-wins, across three layers:

platform default   →   tier / plan   →   negotiated override for this merchant

A negotiated override beats a tier, and a tier beats the platform default. The fee applied to a transaction is the most specific rule that matches it.

That resolution is per merchant and per channel, which is the part that catches people: a merchant can be correctly priced for mobile money and not priced at all for card.

unpriced_combination

When nothing resolves, the transaction is refused with unpriced_combination — a 409, because it is a configuration gap rather than a bad request.

This is our failure and the merchant cannot fix it. They see payments refused for a reason that is meaningless to them, and nothing in their portal explains it.

So it is worth watching for actively rather than waiting for a ticket. It usually appears when a merchant is enabled for a new channel and the pricing for that channel is not configured alongside the capability. Enabling a capability and configuring its price are two actions, and doing only the first produces a merchant who can try and cannot succeed.

The margin floor

A floor below which a transaction may not be priced, refused with margin_floor_breached.

It exists because partner costs are real and a fee below them loses money on every transaction, at volume, silently. Someone negotiating hard against a large merchant will reach it, and when they do, the floor has done exactly its job.

Breaching it is not a configuration to adjust around. If a deal genuinely requires pricing below the floor, that is a commercial decision for whoever owns the margin — made deliberately, with the number in front of them — not a limit to route around in the console.

Who bears the fee

A merchant can be permitted to choose per transaction whether their business or the customer carries the fee. Whether they may choose is an account setting here.

The transaction record keeps all of it separate — the amount charged, what the customer paid, what the merchant receives, and the fee with its bearer — so this is never ambiguous after the fact.

Changing a merchant’s pricing

Audited against you by name, and it is worth the care that implies:

• A merchant repricing changes their economics and ours.
• A reprice that takes effect mid-period makes that period’s reconciliation harder to read, so know what it does to the books before you make it.
• Write the reason. “Commercial agreement” is not a reason — name the agreement.

Commissions

Referral commissions pay out through Money → Commissions, not from this page. They are a separate movement of money with a separate approval path, and the person being paid cannot see their own balance — see Money.