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podcast | Aug 20, 2025 |
How do I explain my decision to pass along vendor processing fees to clients?

On the Ask Us Anything podcast, editor in chief Kaitlin Petersen taps former Trade Tales guests to answer real, confidential designer questions, offering a safe space to discuss business challenges. Have a question of your own to ask? Send an email to start the conversation.

This week, Jean Liu joins the show to answer a question from a designer who is accustomed to absorbing the costs of vendors’ credit card fees but is now looking for a way to build some of these expenses into the client’s final price—and wondering how to explain the process.

Liu, whose design firm is based in Dallas, gives advice on communicating additional fees to clients in a pre-invoice estimate and using credit cards as a form of consumer protection, and she shares how she’s preparing for tariff-related costs.

Crucial insight: When unexpected fees crop up repeatedly during the design process, Liu recognizes that clients can quickly experience spending fatigue. To mitigate that friction, her firm sends an estimate that outlines all known and anticipated costs before ever sending an invoice for furnishings. “The estimate is where we try to bake in as much of the fine print as we can,” she says. “Even if we don’t quite know what, for example, shipping is going to be, we put ‘TBD’ so that we at least call out a line for it [and put it on the client’s radar]. We also use the estimate as a way to add any notes and disclaimers that we foresee coming or that we won’t know until later, such as ‘This estimate does not include installation,’ or ‘Production does not begin until sample finishes are approved.’ That’s a place for us to make a lot of notes so that the client feels good about what they’re about to say yes to or not.”

Key quote: “We run into problems a lot more these days than we did in previous years: things getting damaged in shipping, things not coming in on time, things coming in [the wrong color]. So I feel like 3 percent [in processing fees] is well worth the peace of mind.”

This episode was sponsored by Four Hands and Crypton. If you like what you hear, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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