Gateway Cost
What it costs you, in euros, just to take the money.
What it means
Gateway Cost is the estimated euro total your payment providers keep on the orders in range: a percentage of each order plus a fixed fee per transaction. It's calculated from the percentage and fixed fee you configure for each payment gateway on Cost Settings, applied to your own sales and order count, not read off a provider invoice. The percentage is charged on the whole order, tax and delivery included.
Show the math
Formula and a worked example
The gateway percentage and the fixed fee per order are the two numbers you configure for each payment gateway on Cost Settings, ideally copied from your latest provider statement.
They're applied to your actual sales and order count for the period, so both halves move for different reasons.
Worked example. 1,500 orders worth €120,000, at 2.1% plus €0.30 an order. The percentage part is €2,520, the fixed part is 1,500 × €0.30 = €450, so Gateway Cost is €2,970.
Now sell the same €120,000 across 3,000 smaller orders. The percentage part doesn't move, but the fixed fees double to €900 and the bill becomes €3,420. Same revenue, same provider, €450 more — because fees follow order count, not turnover.
It answers the question
What did it cost you to get paid this period? It's charged on every order that goes through, whatever else the month did.
Why it matters
The fee comes out after everything else, so a euro saved here reaches the bottom line whole — no product cost, no postage, no ad spend attached to it. You also pay it on tax and delivery, money that was never yours to keep.
Small orders are where it bites. A €0.30 fixed fee is nothing on a €150 basket and 2% on a €15 one, so a promotion that brings in a rush of little orders raises this line faster than it raises revenue. Read it as a share through % Gateway Cost% Gateway CostPayment fees as a share of your sales.Under 2.5% is healthy any time your order count moves.
What good looks like
There's no universal euro figure — this grows with every order you take, so a bigger bill in a bigger month isn't a problem. Judge it two ways: as a share of sales via % Gateway Cost% Gateway CostPayment fees as a share of your sales.Under 2.5% is healthy, which does carry a healthy band, and against your own order count. If orders grew 10% and this grew 25%, either your baskets got bigger — the percentage half is charged on sales, not orders — or the card mix moved to costlier methods.
How to improve it
| Lever | What you do | Expect | How long | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Set a minimum order value | Stop taking the tiny orders where the fixed fee alone is over 2% of the sale | Fees down while revenue barely moves | 2 weeks | You turn away small first orders, and some of those buyers would have come back for bigger ones. |
| Fast Reorder the payment methods at checkout | Show your cheapest option first and stop featuring the expensive wallets at the top | Fees down 5–15% | 2–4 weeks | Wallets are the quickest way to pay. Demote them too far and completed orders fall — watch order count, not only the fee. |
| Slow Renegotiate on 12 months of volume | Take your processed volume to your provider and one competitor, and ask both for interchange-plus pricing | Fees down 10–30% | 1 quarter | Interchange-plus makes the monthly bill move with your card mix — cheaper on average, harder to forecast. |
| Slow Push average basket size up | Bundles, thresholds and volume pricing, so the same revenue arrives in fewer orders | The fixed-fee half of the bill shrinks | 1–2 quarters | Thresholds suppress the smallest orders altogether. Order count falls even when revenue holds, and new customers often start small. |
Every lever costs something somewhere. The last column is the one to read twice.
Read it with
This bill is driven by order count, not revenue. Reading it against orders is what makes the fixed-fee half visible.
More orders, cheaper each
Volume grew and the fee bill shrank, so the mix moved to cheaper methods or a rate change landed. Rare, and worth understanding before it reverses.
Fees growing faster than the shop
Some rise is normal — more orders, more fees. It's only a problem when each order costs more to collect than it used to.
Quieter month
The bill followed volume down, exactly as it should. Nothing to do here.
Paying more to take less
Fewer orders and a bigger fee bill can't both be normal. Either the card mix shifted hard or the configured rates no longer match what you're charged.
One is the bill, the other is the rate. Euros rising while the percentage falls is healthy growth — you pay more because you sold more. Both rising says each euro now costs more to collect.
Fees are deducted after everything else, so this lands whole on the bottom line. €3,000 of fees next to €12,000 of Net Profit means a 20% saving is 5% more profit.
Common misreads
It's an estimate: your configured percentage and fixed fee, applied to your orders. It's only as accurate as those two fields on Cost Settings, and a figure near zero usually means they were never filled in.
Order count moves this on its own. More orders, or the same revenue split into smaller ones, both raise the bill with no rate change anywhere. Check orders before you check the contract.
It comes out last, so it lands whole on Net Profit. A few thousand euros here is worth more than the same amount of extra sales, which arrive with product cost and postage attached.
Also called
Payment processing fees · merchant service charges · PSP fees · transaction costs
See yoursYour estimated Gateway Cost for the period, next to the rate it was calculated from.
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