Payment Gateway Fees for Online Stores — Stripe, Mollie, Adyen and PayPal Compared

A payment gateway is the service your store uses to accept cards, bank redirects and wallets — and it takes a fee on every one of those payments. The headline percentages across the big EU gateways are closer together than you'd think: Stripe's standard EEA card rate is 1.5%, Mollie's is 1.80%. What actually decides how much you hand over is usually something else: the fixed fee per transaction at a low basket value, what happens when a customer disputes a charge, and the extra percentage some SaaS platforms add if you don't use their own payments product.

This article compares the standard published rates of the gateways most European merchants evaluate — Stripe, Mollie, Adyen and PayPal — as read on 30 September 2026, each one linked to its source. Rates change, and some of these providers negotiate, so check the current page before you sign anything.

What a payment gateway is, and what the fee is made of

A payment gateway (payment service provider) sits between your customer, their bank or card issuer, and your bank account. The customer picks a card or a bank redirect at checkout, the gateway authorises the payment, confirms it to your store, and — on its own settlement schedule — pays the money into your account.

The rate on a gateway's price list is really three layers stacked together, which you rarely see broken out:

• Interchange — on card payments, this goes to the bank that issued the card. For consumer cards in the EU it's capped by law (more on that below).
• Scheme fees — paid to the card network (Visa, Mastercard) or the operator of a bank-redirect scheme.
• The gateway's own margin — for running the service, fraud screening, settlement and support.

The practical consequence: a gateway can only negotiate its own slice. On card payments it can't go below interchange and scheme fees, however good a customer you are. Interchange is capped at 0.2–0.3% of the transaction (we cite the exact figures below) — well under the 1.5–1.8% that Stripe and Mollie actually charge for an EEA card. That gap is scheme fees plus margin, not evidence that gateways are quietly keeping interchange for themselves.

A gateway isn't the same thing as the set of payment methods you offer. Which methods to support — cards, wallets, bank redirects, buy-now-pay-later — and what each one costs, is covered in our separate article on online payment methods. This one is about the cost and terms of the provider itself.

Gateway rates for EU merchants — Stripe, Mollie, Adyen and PayPal

A few notes on reading this table:

• PayPal has no single EU rate. Its Irish and German merchant pages quote different percentages and different fixed fees, in the same currency, for what is essentially the same product. If you see a flat "PayPal takes 2.9% in Europe" anywhere, it's quoting one country's page as if it were the whole EU. Check the page for the country your business is registered in.
• Adyen's fixed fee in euros is not published where we could check. The pricing page defaults to a US-dollar view ($0.13 per transaction) and renders the rest by JavaScript; one Finnish example row mixed a dollar fixed fee with a euro one ("$0.13 + EUR 0.11 + Interchange++"), which isn't usable as a clean figure. Ask Adyen for your market's number directly rather than trusting a scraped one.
• Not every gateway publishes a dispute fee. Stripe's €20 is explicit; Mollie's pricing page doesn't state one. Absence of a published number isn't the same as "free" — confirm it before you sign.

Why the fixed fee matters more than the headline percentage

At €20, Stripe's €0.25 fixed fee is already close to half the total cost (€0.25 of €0.55); at €300 the percentage dominates and the fixed fee barely moves the number. PayPal's fixed fee (€0.35–0.39) is larger again, which is why its effective rate at a small basket (around 5%) looks nothing like its headline percentage. If your average order is small, compare gateways on your own basket size, not on the percentage printed at the top of the pricing page.

What an online store cannot do: surcharging, interchange and SCA

No surcharge for regulated card payments

Charging a customer extra for paying by card feels like an easy way to pass on the gateway's fee. For most payments in the EU, it's against the law. Directive (EU) 2015/2366 (PSD2), Article 62(4) states: "Member States shall ensure that the payee shall not request charges for the use of payment instruments for which interchange fees are regulated under Chapter II of Regulation (EU) 2015/751 and for those payment services to which Regulation (EU) No 260/2012 applies." In practice, that covers consumer Visa and Mastercard cards and SEPA euro credit transfers.

Interchange caps

Regulation (EU) 2015/751 caps the interchange fee on consumer cards: 0.2% of the transaction value for debit cards (Art. 3(1)) and 0.3% for credit cards (Art. 4). This is one layer of the fee, and member states may set lower domestic caps. It doesn't explain the full 1.5–1.8% a gateway charges — that figure also carries scheme fees and the gateway's margin.

Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) and the EUR 30 threshold

RTS (EU) 2018/389 requires two-factor authentication for most card payments online, with exemptions that shape how many steps a customer sees at checkout:

• Remote low-value payments (Art. 16) — up to EUR 30, provided the cumulative total since the last strong authentication doesn't exceed EUR 100 or five consecutive transactions. The commonly repeated "EUR 50" figure is Art. 11, which covers contactless payments at a physical point of sale, not online checkout.
• Recurring payments (Art. 14) — strong authentication is required when a series is set up; later payments in the same series can be exempted.
• Transaction-risk analysis (Art. 18) — thresholds of EUR 100, 250 or 500, depending on the payment service provider's own fraud rate.

These exemptions belong to the payment service provider, not the merchant — you choose the gateway, the gateway (and the card issuer) decides whether a given customer skips the extra step.

The SaaS platform surcharge: Shopify's third-party-gateway fee

On a subscription platform, the gateway decision isn't only between providers — the platform itself can add a fee if you skip its own payments product. Shopify Payments is available on Shopify's EU plans, with rates (excluding VAT) that fall as the plan tier rises:

(shopify.com/ie/pricing; third-party fee: help.shopify.com) — that bottom row is charged on top of whatever your chosen gateway bills you, for every payment that isn't a manual method like cash on delivery or a bank transfer. On the Basic plan, routing a €100 order through Stripe instead of Shopify Payments costs €1.75 (Stripe) plus €2.00 (Shopify's 2%) — €3.75 total, more than Shopify Payments' own €2.25. The surcharge shrinks fast on higher plans, which is one reason merchants with real volume often end up on Shopify Payments by default rather than by comparison.

WooCommerce, by contrast, charges "0% revenue share" on any gateway you connect (woocommerce.com/pricing) — you pay the gateway and nothing else at the platform level, in exchange for running and securing the integration yourself. Which platform fits depends on more than this one line item; we compare the full set in our platform comparison.

How to negotiate a gateway rate

Not every rate card is open to negotiation, and the providers above don't say so explicitly on their public pages — ask directly rather than assuming either way. When you do ask, bring numbers, not a general request for "cheaper":

1. Your online payment volume over the last few months, and its trend.
2. Your average basket — it decides whether you're negotiating the percentage or the fixed fee.
3. Your payment-method mix — cards, bank redirects, wallets, BNPL each carry a different cost structure.
4. Your refund and dispute rate — a low dispute rate is itself a case for a better rate.
5. Competing quotes on the same volume — the table above gives you a starting point for each provider.

Negotiate more than the headline rate. Fixed fees, dispute costs and (where a provider publishes one) reserve terms can matter more than a tenth of a percentage point.

Choosing a gateway in six steps

1. Work out your average basket. Below roughly €20–30, the fixed fee dominates; above a few hundred euros, the percentage does. Run your own basket through the worked example above.
2. Check the payment methods you need. Does the gateway support the bank-redirect and wallet methods your customers actually use? See our payment methods guide for the full breakdown.
3. Add up the fees the headline rate doesn't show. Disputes, currency conversion, and — on a SaaS platform — the third-party-gateway surcharge.
4. Confirm settlement and payout terms directly with the provider. We could not confirm a single EU-wide payout schedule for any of these providers from their public pages; ask for your account's specific terms rather than relying on a number you've seen quoted elsewhere.
5. Check what your store platform says. Shopify's surcharge shrinks sharply by plan tier; WooCommerce has none.
6. Keep an alternative integrated. A second gateway is insurance against an outage, a frozen account, or a rate increase. Revisit the comparison once a year, or whenever a provider changes its price list.

To see gateway and platform costs together over several years, use our e-commerce TCO calculator. If you're still planning the store itself, the online store cost calculator includes payment integration in the starting cost. For the rest of the payments and logistics picture, see payments and logistics.