Small retailers face increased bills of around $300 a year in Eftpos interchange fees – the charges levied by banks to process the payments - thanks to changes being pushed through by Epal, the organisation in charge of Eftpos.

The increased fee is now scheduled for introduction on October 1, leaving retailers in a dilemma about whether to pass on the extra costs to customers or try and absorb it themselves.

Under the new rules, the merchants’ bank, which used to receive 5c per transaction to help fund the Eftpos system, will now be charged an average of nearly 10cents per transaction, a huge increase in their costs which now appears will be passed directly through to retailers.

Although the banks have not yet stated explicitly that they will pass on the extra costs, the tone of the various press releases issued by Epal suggests that both retailers and consumers are in danger of getting slugged.

One particularly controversial aspect of these changes is that Coles and Woolworths, which together account for about 30% of all Eftpos transactions, will be exempt from the charges and can remain on the older, cheaper, charging structure. The reason is that these two giants are big Epal shareholders and board members, so have been able to negotiate themselves a special position.

This leaves smaller, “Mum and Dad” type businesses to bear the brunt of the increase.

At a time when the retail sector is struggling and banks are still making record profits, critics say this increase seems at best untimely, and at worst downright greedy, since the big four banks could gain over $100m a year in extra revenue from these changes.

“Australian shops and consumers are already doing it tough – they certainly don’t need further charges to access their own money with their debit card” said Jost Stollmann, CEO of Tyro Payments, and independent Eftpos operator.

But the Eftpos industry argues that it is still cheaper than credit cards such as Visa and Mastercard.

Around 380,000 small businesses will be affected by the change, who between them conduct about 1.2billion Eftpos transactions each year.

Russell Zimmerman of the Australian Retailers Association has called on the banks to think twice before passing any of the fee increase on to their retailer customers. “We have always maintainted that retailers should not get hit with the increase. This is an unfair fee that hits smaller retailers hardest because small shops tend to take more payments with Eftpost, compared to larger stores that take most larger payments on credit cards.”