An online store owner comparing payment gateways usually starts with the advertised rate, which is a poor guide to what the store will pay and how many orders it will lose. Merchants of all sizes paid a total of $172 billion in processing fees in 2023, according to The New York Times, up from roughly $116 billion the year before the pandemic. A gateway affects that bill through its pricing, and it also decides which customers get approved, how much fraud reaches the store, and how many hours the staff spend on disputes.
Cost structure beyond the advertised rate
Card acceptance fees are typically 1.5% to 3.5% of each transaction, Reuters reported in June 2024. A gateway quoting a rate inside that range may still add monthly minimums, payout fees, and separate charges for currency conversion. Fixed per-transaction charges affect low-priced stores most. A $0.30 charge is 1.5% of a $20 order and less than 0.1% of a $400 order. Run the comparison against the store’s own average order value.
Ask each provider to price the last 3 months of actual orders. Quotes built on different pricing models become comparable only when they are applied to the same transactions, including refunds and any fee the provider keeps when a refund is issued.
Approval rates and false declines
Baymard Institute’s 2026 survey of 1,083 US adults found that 10% had abandoned an online purchase in the prior 3 months because a card was declined. Some of those declines are correct. Others are false declines, in which a legitimate customer is refused, and Datos Insights estimated that false declines cost ecommerce business merchants worldwide nearly $175 billion in sales in 2024.
Gateways differ in how they route transactions and retry failed attempts. Ask each candidate for approval rates by card type and by country. Refusal to share those figures should end the conversation.
Integration and checkout control
Gateways offer 3 levels of integration. A hosted page sends the shopper to the provider’s domain to pay, which limits design control and reduces the merchant’s security obligations. Embedded fields keep the shopper on the store’s domain while card details go directly to the provider. A full application programming interface gives developers the most control and places the largest compliance obligations on the merchant.
A store built on a common storefront product should confirm that a maintained plug-in exists and check the date of its last update. An abandoned plug-in can fail during a routine storefront upgrade, and the store will learn about it when orders stop arriving.
Payment method coverage
Baymard’s survey also found that 9% of shoppers had abandoned a purchase because too few payment methods were offered. Providers of payments for ecommerce businesses differ in which methods they enable by default. Request the full list by country and confirm which ones have extra fees.
A store selling mainly to US customers may need only cards and 1 or 2 mobile wallets, while a store shipping to the Netherlands will need a bank-based option because that is how many Dutch shoppers pay. Each added option takes space on the screen and has a setup cost, and a method used by 1% of customers may never repay it.
Payout timing and reporting
Payout schedules determine how much cash a store has on hand. A provider that settles in 2 business days leaves a store in a different position from one that holds funds for 7 days or keeps a rolling reserve against future refunds. New merchants are the most likely to be placed on a reserve. Read that term before the first order is processed.
Reporting should match how the store keeps its books. Exports that show gross sales, fees, refunds, and net deposits by payout date allow a bookkeeper to match each bank deposit in minutes. Monthly totals alone add hours to every month-end close.
Security and compliance responsibilities
Any store accepting cards must meet the Payment Card Industry Data privacy and security Standard, and the requirements that had been optional under version 4.0 became mandatory on March 31, 2025. Tokenization helps by replacing a stored card number with a reference value, so the store’s own systems never hold the number.
A data breach can expose customers’ card numbers, and a store found responsible can lose its ability to accept cards at all. A merchant should confirm in writing which controls the gateway manages and which remain with the store, since the division varies by integration type and is often described only in the contract.
Fraud tools and dispute support
Stolen card details often originate in phishing emails, and credit card fraud of this kind later appears as ordinary orders on a store’s site. Datos Insights estimated that net ecommerce fraud losses would reach nearly $29 billion in 2024. A basic gateway may offer only address and security code checks, while a stronger one adds device data and rules the merchant can edit to match its own order patterns.
The Merchant Risk Council’s 2025 survey of more than 1,000 merchants found that they won about 17% of fraud-coded disputes. With a win rate that low, the prevention tools deserve more scrutiny during selection than the dispute dashboard does, although a store still needs a simple way to submit evidence before the deadline.
Reliability and contract terms
An outage during a sale produces orders that never come back. The global technology outage of July 2024, caused by a faulty security update, stopped operations at companies that had no direct relationship with the vendor responsible. A merchant should ask for a published uptime history and the terms of any service credits, and should find out if the gateway has a backup route when a banking partner fails.
Some contracts include hidden fees such as early termination charges, and some providers keep stored card tokens when a merchant leaves.
Confirm before signing that tokens can be exported to a new provider at no charge.
A 30-day test before signing
Before signing a long contract, route a small share of real orders through the leading candidate for 30 days and compare its approval rate, fees per order, and dispute count against those of the current provider. Put those 3 numbers in a single table and bring it to the contract discussion, because a figure drawn from the store’s own customers is harder for a sales representative to argue with than a benchmark from a brochure.
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