A SaaS company and an online shop both take card payments, and that is where the similarity ends. The shop sells a thing once to someone nearby. The SaaS sells access repeatedly to someone who might be anywhere, changes their plan mid-month, and expects to do all of it without talking to a human.
Those differences change what you need from a gateway. Picking one on headline rate alone tends to produce a setup that works fine for the first hundred customers and becomes an obstacle somewhere around the first serious growth.
Your customers are everywhere, and that is the first problem
A shop usually sells into a handful of countries. A SaaS gets its tenth customer from a country nobody planned for, which means cross-border declines arrive earlier than anyone expects.
Ask how the provider handles a card issued outside your home market: does the transaction route locally where possible, or does everything go through one acquiring relationship? The difference shows up as several percentage points of approval rate, and at subscription scale that is not a rounding error. Our processing setup covers routing and the cascade that retries a declined payment through a second route.
Currency is the twin of that question. Charging everyone in euros is simplest and costs you conversions in markets where buyers expect local pricing. Charging locally means you deal with settlement in several currencies, which is manageable but has to be designed rather than discovered.
Trials, upgrades and the awkward middle of a month
Nothing in a shop checkout prepares a gateway for a customer who starts a fourteen-day trial, upgrades on day nine, adds three seats on day twenty and downgrades the following month.
The gateway has to support zero-amount authorisation so a trial can verify a card without charging it. It has to let you change the amount of a recurring charge without re-collecting card details. And it has to handle a charge that happens outside the normal schedule, because every upgrade is exactly that. If any of these needs a workaround, that workaround becomes permanent.
Self-service is a payments requirement, not a design preference
SaaS customers expect to manage everything themselves, and that expectation reaches into billing. They want to change a card, download an invoice, update a VAT number and cancel without writing to support.
Two of those are payment features. Updating a card means the gateway must re-tokenise without losing the subscription, and cancelling means the subscription and the stored credential have to end together. Shops rarely need either, so shop gateways often do them badly.
The commercial side of that convenience is lower support cost, which matters more at twenty euros a month than at two hundred.
Invoices and tax lines
B2B SaaS customers need a document their accountant accepts, with the right company details and the right tax treatment. This is where many setups improvise, and improvised invoices eventually meet an auditor.
Decide early whether invoices come from the billing system or from your own accounting, and make sure the numbering is sequential either way. Where the money collects matters too: a business IBAN in your own company name keeps settlement, refunds and outgoing payments in one place instead of three.
When it is time to change gateway
Switching is disruptive, so most teams wait too long. Three signals suggest the moment has come. Approval rates differ sharply by region and the provider has no answer beyond «that is the market». Every commercial experiment needs engineering work. And the finance team keeps a parallel spreadsheet because the reports do not reconcile.
None of those are emergencies, which is precisely why they persist. The cost of staying is spread thin across quarters, while the cost of moving arrives in one month, and that asymmetry keeps companies on setups they outgrew years ago.
If you do move, run both in parallel rather than cutting over, and migrate new customers first. Questions that come up during such projects are collected in our FAQ.
What the review covers is on the merchant account page.
What to ask before signing
- How are cross-border payments routed, and what is the approval rate by region?
- Can a trial verify a card without charging it?
- Can the recurring amount change without the customer re-entering details?
- Is there a customer portal, and can it be embedded in our product?
- How are failed payments reported — count only, or by reason?
- What happens to stored cards if we leave?
The last one is the question nobody asks at signing and everybody asks two years later. The answer depends on both providers and on certification, so getting it in writing early is worth more than a small discount.
Connection takes from 5 days once documents are complete, with the steps on how it works.
Rates for middle-risk models start from 1.8%; the structure is on the pricing page.
We covered the account side in the piece on accounts for subscription businesses.
Connection from 5 days. Fees from 1.8% — transparent terms, no hidden charges. Leave a request or book a consultation and we will put together the right setup for your niche and risk profile.