Most comparisons of payment gateways end up as a table of fees. However, that table hides the thing that actually costs money. A shop paying 2% with an approval rate of 82% earns less than a shop paying 2.4% at 91%. That is because the second one gets paid for nine extra orders in every hundred. Fees are visible on the invoice; declined
orders are not visible anywhere unless someone goes looking.
So the question is not which gateway is cheapest. Rather, it is which one loses the fewest customers between «pay» and «thank you». Here is how to tell them apart
before you sign anything.
What a gateway actually does
The gateway is the part that takes the card data, runs the security checks and
asks the bank for permission. It does not hold your money. Nor does it decide whether you are allowed to trade: that is the merchant account behind it. Confusing the two is the most common reason people compare the wrong things. As a result, a cheap gateway on a difficult account is not cheap.
Because the gateway sits exactly where the customer is about to pay, every
delay or redirect costs conversion. A checkout that jumps to a third-party page
and back loses buyers who assumed something went wrong. This matters more for
goods with impulse purchase than for considered ones, yet it always matters.
The five questions that separate providers
1. What happens to a declined payment
Issuers decline for dozens of reasons. Most of them are soft: a limit, a missing confirmation, a random check. A good setup retries through another route;
a bad one shows an error and lets the customer leave. Ask directly whether failed
payments are routed to a second provider, and what share of them comes back
approved.
2. How 3-D Secure is applied
European rules require strong authentication, but exemptions exist for low-risk
and low-value transactions. Whether the provider uses them decides how many of
your buyers have to open a banking app mid-purchase. Blanket authentication on
every order is the safe choice for the provider and an expensive one for you.
3. Which payment methods are native, not bolted on
Cards cover the bulk of European checkout. Still, bank transfers, wallets and local methods carry real volume in individual markets. If a method is supported
through a third party, the failure modes multiply and reconciliation gets harder.
Our processing setup lists what runs natively.
4. When money reaches your account
Settlement timing changes how much working capital you need. A shop that buys
stock weekly feels T+7 very differently from a shop selling digital goods. Ask
what the schedule is, whether it changes during disputes, and whether a reserve
applies.
5. What it costs in total
The headline rate is one line out of several. Fixed fee per transaction, currency conversion, chargeback handling, refunds, monthly minimums. Each is small, yet together they are not. Rates for middle-risk retail start from 1.8%. Our pricing page shows the structure rather than a single number. That is because the number depends on what you sell and where.
Where shops lose money quietly
Cross-border declines. The card is issued in one country, the shop registered in another, the processor in a third. Consequently, they produce more declines than any of them would alone. If a third of your traffic is foreign, this is the first
place to look.
Currency conversion applied twice. Once by the gateway, once
by the issuer. The customer sees a different amount than expected and disputes it. Meanwhile, a dispute over three euros costs the same to handle as one over three hundred.
Refunds that behave like new transactions. In some setups a refund carries its own fee and a long delay. Therefore the customer opens a dispute before the money arrives. You then pay twice for the same order.
None of this is exotic, yet it rarely appears in a sales conversation. The
short answers to the usual objections sit in our FAQ.
What to prepare before applying
Connection takes from 5 days, and most of that is document review rather than
technical work. Company registration, ownership structure, a working site with
visible terms, delivery and refund policies — that is the standard set. Shops get held up most often on the site itself. Prices do not match the checkout and contacts lead nowhere. Besides, the terms were copied from a template and mention a different business.
The sequence is laid out on our how it works
page. If you also sell across several storefronts, say so at the start. Otherwise adding them later means repeating the review.
Which payment methods you offer is a separate decision. Besides, it is worth making before the integration rather than after.
A sensible way to decide
Take your last month of orders and split it by country and by card type. Then
ask each candidate the five questions above against that specific profile, not in
the abstract. A provider excellent for domestic cards may be mediocre for traffic from abroad. Moreover, the averages will never show it.
Once you have two finalists, run both for a month if the volume allows. Approval rate is the number that decides. However, nobody can quote it honestly in advance. After all, it depends on your customers rather than on the provider’s brochure. We covered the account side of this
in
a separate piece.
Connection from 5 days. Fees from 1.8% — transparent terms, no hidden charges.
Leave a request or book a consultation. We will put together the right setup for your niche and risk profile.