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What are you really paying to take payments?
Processing fees, the fixed cost per order, and Shopify’s surcharge for not using Shopify Payments — then the row nobody else shows you: what the payments that never authorised are costing you.
How card processing fees are calculated
A card fee is a percentage of the transaction plus a fixed amount per order — 2.9% + $0.30 is the common US shape. On Shopify, a gateway other than Shopify Payments adds a platform surcharge on top. Your effective rate is total fees over total volume, and it is always higher than the headline percentage because of the fixed fee per order.
Run your numbers.
Prefilled with an illustrative store, not a client. Every rate is editable — replace the defaults with what your own statement says.
What settled, not what was attempted.
Drives the order count, which is what the fixed fee is charged against.
Fills the three fields below. Published rates checked 2026-09-09 — verify against your own plan and country.
Platform % is Shopify’s fee for not using Shopify Payments. Zero on Shopify Payments itself.
Authorised charges over attempted charges, from your gateway’s reporting. Left empty on purpose: we do not publish a benchmark, because no credible public one exists.
Total payment cost, a year
$156,141
An effective 3.25% on 4,706 orders a month — not the 2.90% on the pricing page.
- Percentage feesvolume × rate
- $11,600
- Fixed feesorders × per-order fee
- $1,412
- Platform surchargevolume × platform %
- $0
- Cost per ordertotal ÷ orders
- $2.77
Revenue that never authorised
—
Enter your approval rate above. At a 97% approval rate this store would be losing more each year to declines than it pays in processing fees — which is why the row exists.
The fee is not the expensive part
Every fee calculator on page one stops at the processing rate. For a repeat-purchase business that is the smaller of the two numbers.
- 1
A fee costs you a percentage. A decline costs you the order.
At 2.9% you keep $97.10 of every $100. At a 3-point-worse approval rate you keep $0 of three orders in every hundred — and on a subscription, you may lose the customer behind them too.
- 2
Providers with identical rates differ on authorisation
Routing, retry behaviour, network tokenisation and account updater coverage all move the authorisation rate, and none of them appear on a pricing page. Two gateways quoting 2.9% + 30¢ are not the same product.
- 3
The fixed fee is a tax on low order values
At a $15 average order, $0.30 per transaction is 2% on its own — an effective rate near 4.9%. At $150 it is 0.2%. Bundle two items and your payment costs fall without a single conversation with a provider.
- 4
Which is why a fee comparison is the wrong question
The right one is total cost of accepted revenue: fees, plus surcharge, plus what never authorised. Get the decline mix from your gateway and read it with the decline code decoder — the split between soft and hard tells you how much of the gap is recoverable at all.
The published rates these defaults come from
Starting points, not quotes. Every one is editable above, because your plan, your country and anything you have negotiated all change them.
| Plan | Rate | Per order | Platform surcharge | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shopify Payments — Basic | 2.90% | $0.30 | — | Shopify published pricing, US online rates |
| Shopify Payments — Grow | 2.70% | $0.30 | — | Shopify published pricing, US online rates |
| Shopify Payments — Advanced | 2.50% | $0.30 | — | Shopify published pricing, US online rates |
| Shopify Payments — Plus | 2.25% | $0.30 | — | Shopify published pricing, US online rates |
| Third-party gateway on Basic | 2.90% | $0.30 | 2% | Gateway rate plus Shopify's published third-party transaction fee |
| Third-party gateway on Advanced | 2.90% | $0.30 | 0.6% | Gateway rate plus Shopify's published third-party transaction fee |
| Third-party gateway on Plus | 2.90% | $0.30 | 0.2% | Gateway rate plus Shopify's published third-party transaction fee |
Read this before quoting any of it. These are vendor-published list prices for US online card transactions, checked on 2026-09-09. They vary by country, card type, plan and negotiated terms, and they change without notice. They are defaults in an editable field, not a claim about what you pay. No approval-rate benchmark appears anywhere on this page — no credible public one exists, so the field stays empty until you supply your own. metric to confirm.
What this calculator leaves out
Cross-border and currency conversion. International cards usually carry an extra percentage, and multi-currency selling adds a conversion fee. If a meaningful share of your volume is outside your home market, raise the rate field rather than trusting the domestic default.
Chargeback costs. A dispute fee, the lost goods and the admin time are all real and none of them are here. That is a different calculation, and a different service line.
Interchange detail. Blended pricing hides a wide range: a rewards card costs the acquirer far more than a debit card. On interchange-plus pricing your effective rate moves with your customer mix, month to month.
The value of what you would give up. Shopify Payments is priced against convenience — checkout integration, dispute handling, one dashboard. A third-party gateway that wins on paper can cost more in operational time than it saves in basis points.
Definitions
- Effective rate
- Total payment cost over total volume. Always higher than the headline percentage, because of the fixed fee per order.
- Platform surcharge
- Shopify’s additional fee for processing through a gateway other than Shopify Payments. Charged on top of what the gateway takes.
- Approval rate
- Authorised charges over attempted charges. Also called the authorisation rate. The number that decides how much revenue never arrives at all.
- Interchange
- The portion of the fee that goes to the card issuer. Varies by card type, which is why blended pricing hides a wide range.
- Network tokenisation
- Replacing a stored card number with a network-issued token that survives reissue. One of the levers that moves approval rates without touching price.
Questions about payment fees
How do I calculate Stripe fees?
Multiply the transaction by the percentage rate and add the fixed amount — on a $100 charge at 2.9% + $0.30 that is $2.90 + $0.30 = $3.20, leaving $96.80. Across a month it is easier to work from volume: volume × rate, plus the fixed fee times the number of orders. That second term is the one people forget, and on a low average order value it is the larger of the two.
Why does average order value change my effective rate?
Because the fixed fee is charged per transaction, not per dollar. At a $15 AOV, a $0.30 fixed fee is 2% on its own — so your effective rate is roughly 4.9% rather than the 2.9% on the pricing page. At a $150 AOV the same fixed fee is 0.2%. Raising AOV lowers your payment costs as a percentage without renegotiating anything.
What is the Shopify third-party transaction fee?
An additional percentage Shopify charges when you process through a gateway other than Shopify Payments. It varies by plan and is charged on top of whatever your gateway takes. It is the reason a third-party gateway with a lower headline rate frequently costs more in total, and it is the line most fee calculators leave out entirely. Check your own plan — the defaults here are published rates we checked on the date shown, not a quote.
Why does this calculator ask for an approval rate?
Because for a subscription business it is usually the bigger number. A payment that never authorises costs you the whole order, not 2.9% of it. Two providers with identical published rates can differ by several points of authorisation, and that difference dwarfs the fee difference. Almost nobody compares providers on it, because almost nobody has the figure to hand.
Where do I find my approval rate?
Your gateway reports it, though rarely on the dashboard you look at daily. In Stripe it is in the payments analytics as the authorisation rate; Shopify Payments exposes it through payment reporting; Adyen calls it the conversion or authorisation rate. Pull last month's authorised charges against attempted charges. If the number surprises you, that is itself the finding.
Do you publish benchmark approval rates?
No. There is no credible public benchmark for authorisation rates by provider, and inventing one would make the most important row on this page the least trustworthy thing on it. The field is yours to fill in, and it shows an em dash until you do.
Are these rates current?
They are published rates we checked by hand on 2026-09-09, and every one of them is an editable field precisely because card pricing changes without notice and varies by country, plan, card type and whatever you have negotiated. Treat the defaults as a starting point and replace them with your own statement.
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