Every platform publishes a rate. None of them is what you pay. Here is the arithmetic, with the current published rates, and what actually moves the total.
The gap isn't dishonesty. It's that the published number is one line of a bill with four or five lines on it.
Rates verified 2 August 2026
Check them before you rely on them. Every company on this page changes theirs.
| Platform | Online card rate | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Stripe | 2.9% + 30¢ | +0.5% manually entered · +1.5% international card · +1% currency conversion |
| Shopify Payments — Basic | 2.9% + 30¢ | Plus a 2% penalty if you use any other processor |
| Shopify Payments — Grow | 2.7% + 30¢ | Plus 1% for any other processor |
| Shopify Payments — Advanced | 2.5% + 30¢ | Plus 0.6% for any other processor |
| Shopify Payments — Plus | negotiated | Plus 0.2% for any other processor |
| Lovable Payments (Paddle) | 5.0% + 50¢ | The default when you build a store with Lovable |
| Interchange-plus | interchange + a fixed markup | You see the wholesale cost and the markup separately |
A percentage scales with your basket. A flat fee doesn't. On small orders the flat fee is the rate. At Stripe's 2.9% + 30¢:
| Order value | You pay | Effective rate |
|---|---|---|
| $12 | $0.65 | 5.4% |
| $25 | $1.03 | 4.1% |
| $40 | $1.46 | 3.7% |
| $150 | $4.65 | 3.1% |
| $500 | $14.80 | 3.0% |
If you sell $12 items online, your real cost is closer to five and a half percent than to the 2.9% on the pricing page. Nobody is hiding this. Almost nobody works it out.
Do it now, with your own numbers: divide last month's total processing cost by last month's card volume. That figure, your effective rate, is the only one worth comparing. Every other number on this page, including ours, is marketing until you've run that division.
If you built your store with Lovable, payments default to Lovable Payments, which runs on Paddle at 5.0% + 50¢. Lovable is straightforward about this. It's published.
At a $40 average order, that's 6.25% all-in. A store doing $30,000 a month at that average order value is running roughly 750 orders: 5% of $30,000 is $1,500, plus 750 × 50¢ is $375. $1,875 a month. $22,500 a year.
You're getting something for it. Paddle is a merchant of record, which means they handle sales tax and VAT registration and remittance globally, and take on the liability. If you sell software to forty countries, that's worth real money and you should probably keep paying for it.
If you sell physical goods to customers in Texas, you are paying for an international tax apparatus you will never use. That's the whole calculation. It isn't complicated, and it's the same one to run against Shopify's plan tiers.
Stripe adds 0.5% for a manually keyed card and 1.5% for an international one, plus 1% if a currency has to be converted. A US store selling to Canadian customers with a card-on-file failure rate is not paying 2.9%. It's paying north of 4% on those orders.
If you're on Shopify Basic and you move to any other processor, Shopify charges you an extra 2% on top of whatever that processor charges. A 2.4% + 10¢ processor becomes 4.4% + 10¢ in practice. That is worse than Shopify Payments, and we'll tell you so rather than sell you something that costs you money.
The penalty falls to 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. Below Advanced, the math usually doesn't work. At Plus, it usually does. That's the honest line, and it's why the first question we ask a Shopify merchant is which plan they're on.
WooCommerce, Magento and a custom checkout have no such penalty. Neither does a store you built yourself.
A refund doesn't return the processing fee on most platforms. You refund $100 and you're out the $3.20 as well. Chargebacks carry a fee of their own regardless of who wins. And there is usually a monthly cost somewhere. Ask any processor, us included, for these in writing before you sign anything.
If you've seen a shop with a cash price and a card price on the shelf tag, that's dual pricing. The card price is the posted price, and the terminal rings the number on the tag. Merchants running it keep the full value of card sales, and it's how a lot of in-person retail now works.
It does not transfer to a website, and anyone who tells you it does is selling you something they can't deliver.
The reason is simple. Dual pricing works because the customer has a real choice at the counter, and cash is genuinely there. Online, nobody can hand you cash. If your checkout only takes cards, there is no second price anybody can actually pay, so the cash price is decoration, and what you've really done is raise your prices and print two numbers next to each other.
Regulators have noticed. Massachusetts' fee rules, in force since September 2025, require the advertised total to include "fees consumers cannot reasonably avoid, such as credit card processing fees when there is no other viable payment option." California's SB 478 applies the same logic and says explicitly that it covers online and physical stores alike. And e-commerce is interstate by nature: your Texas store sells to Massachusetts.
You'll also see online programs that add a percentage to the total at the payment step. That's a different model with different rules: capped by the card brands, thirty days' advance notice to Visa and Mastercard before you start, never applied to debit or prepaid cards, itemised as its own line on the receipt, and prohibited outright in several states. It's legal where it's legal, and it is not what we sell.
Our dual pricing programs are for in-person, card-present business. We'd rather say that plainly than sell you a website program that doesn't hold up.
A flat rate is an average with a margin baked in. You pay the same 2.9% on a low-cost debit card as on a premium rewards card that genuinely costs more to accept. Interchange-plus shows you the wholesale cost and the markup as separate lines. If your customers skew toward debit and basic credit, you were subsidising somebody else's airline miles under a flat rate.
It isn't automatically cheaper. It's automatically legible, and you can only manage a number you can see.
This is the real online lever. Stripe's own ACH rate is 0.8% capped at $5. On a $600 wholesale order that's $5 against $17.70 on a card. Nobody enters routing numbers for a $30 impulse buy, but for subscriptions, B2B invoices, deposits and repeat customers, offering bank transfer alongside cards moves your blended cost more than any rate negotiation will.
Passing extra data, like a purchase order number, tax amount and line items, can qualify commercial card transactions for materially lower interchange. It's invisible to your customer and it requires a gateway that supports it. Most B2B stores leave this on the table.
Every keyed card costs more and carries more fraud liability than one entered by the cardholder. If your team is typing card numbers from phone orders, a hosted payment link usually pays for itself.
We're a merchant services provider. In person we run dual pricing, which is the product most of our merchants come for. Online we do the ordinary, unglamorous thing: honest interchange-plus pricing, a checkout that works, ACH where it makes sense, and Level II and III for merchants selling to businesses.
Our processing platform is PayArc, which supports a hosted checkout page, embedded card fields that keep customers on your site, Apple Pay and Google Pay, 3-D Secure, tokenised cards for repeat purchases, ACH, and subscriptions, with a free plugin for WooCommerce and a documented API for anything custom.
If you're running one store online and one counter in person, both sit under the same account and the same deposits.
We will tell you when to stay where you are. If you're on Shopify Basic, you're probably better off on Shopify Payments and we'll say so. If you sell software into forty countries, Paddle's tax handling is worth its 5%. We'd rather be the people who told you that than the people who moved you and cost you money.
Run your own number first. Last month's total processing cost, divided by last month's card volume. Then talk to anybody, us included, with that figure in hand. If you want a second pair of eyes on it, we'll go through it with you and show you what the same volume looks like on interchange-plus. Takes about fifteen minutes and there's nothing to sign. Book fifteen minutes → Or call (214) 972-2423.
Rates for Stripe, Shopify and Lovable are the published US rates as of 2 August 2026 and are subject to change by those companies. Level II and III interchange qualification depends on card type and data submitted. ACH availability and pricing depend on underwriting. Dual pricing programs apply to in-person, card-present transactions. Pacta Payments LLC is not a bank.