Black Friday falls on 27 November this year, and for most webshops the next eight weeks bring more orders than any other period. Every one of those orders carries a small fee to your payment provider. On its own it is a few cents. Over a year it is often thousands of euros, and it is one of the few costs most merchants never revisit after launch.
One of our clients recently asked us a simple question: what does payment processing actually cost at around €500,000 in annual revenue, if you compare Shopify Payments, Mollie and Shopware Payments? We ran the numbers. The difference between the providers turned out to be smaller than expected. The difference between the platforms did not...
To keep the comparison fair, we used one scenario for all three:
The 70% iDEAL share is not a guess. According to the Thuiswinkel Markt Monitor, iDEAL accounted for 73% of Dutch online transactions in Q3 2023, and it remains the dominant method as it moves to the iDEAL | Wero brand this year. We left PayPal out, because its pricing works differently on each platform and would blur the comparison.
| Payment method | Shopify Payments (Grow) | Mollie | Shopware Payments (Community/Rise) |
|---|---|---|---|
| iDEAL / Wero | €0.29 | €0.32 | 0.19% (ramp-up), 0.25% standard |
| EU consumer card | 1.8% + €0.25 | 1.8% + €0.25 | 1.25% + €0.20 (ramp-up), 1.65% + €0.27 standard |
| Klarna | 2.99% + €0.35 | 2.99% + €0.45 | 2.10% + €0.35 (ramp-up), 2.79% + €0.35 standard |
| Monthly fee | None (platform subscription separate) | None | None |
Two things stand out straight away. Shopify Payments and Mollie are almost identical. And Shopware Payments charges iDEAL as a percentage of the order, not as a fixed amount, which matters more than it looks. We will come back to that.
Applied to our scenario, the yearly transaction costs come out as follows:
| Setup | iDEAL | Cards | Klarna | Platform surcharge | Total per year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shopify Payments on Shopify Grow | €1,353 | €2,133 | €1,728 | €0 | €5,215 |
| Mollie on Shopware | €1,493 | €2,133 | €1,795 | €0 | €5,422 |
| Mollie on Shopify Grow | €1,493 | €2,133 | €1,795 | €5,000 | €10,422 |
| Shopware Payments, ramp-up rates | €665 | €1,517 | €1,283 | €0 | €3,465 |
| Shopware Payments, standard rates | €875 | €2,010 | €1,628 | €0 | €4,513 |
Notice where the money goes. Klarna handles 10% of revenue but accounts for roughly a third of the total cost in every setup. If buy now, pay later is growing in your checkout, that is the line to watch.
Between Shopify Payments and Mollie, the gap is about €200 a year. That is not a reason to switch anything. The number that changes the picture is in the fourth column.
Shopify charges an extra transaction fee when you process payments through a third-party provider instead of Shopify Payments: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. That fee is calculated over your revenue, on top of whatever the provider itself charges. At €500,000 on the Grow plan, that is €5,000 a year, which doubles your payment costs.
There are good reasons to want your own provider. You may already have a Mollie account with negotiated rates, need payment methods that Shopify Payments does not offer, run several sales channels through one provider, or have your accounting and reconciliation built around it. On Shopify, that freedom has a price. On Shopware it does not: Shopware states explicitly that there are no penalties or commercial disadvantages for using another provider. Mollie, PayPal, Stripe or Adyen all run as a plugin without a platform surcharge.
This is the same pattern we described in our comparison of multistorefront costs on Shopware and Shopify: the visible price is rarely the issue. The question is which costs scale with you, and which choices the platform makes expensive.
At ramp-up rates, Shopware Payments comes out lowest at around €3,500 a year. Before you plan around that number, three caveats.
It is not available in the Netherlands yet. Shopware Payments is currently limited to merchants with a registered office in Germany or Austria. Shopware has announced a phased roll-out to other EU markets, but without a date.
The ramp-up rates are temporary. Merchants who activate before 31 December 2026 get the lower rates for twelve months. After that, standard pricing applies and the total in our scenario rises to about €4,500. Still the cheapest option, but by less.
Percentage-based iDEAL punishes high order values. At 0.25% per transaction, an iDEAL payment costs less than the fixed €0.29 to €0.32 of Shopify Payments or Mollie only when the order is below roughly €116. For many B2C shops that is fine. For B2B shops with order values of several hundred euros, it turns around. At an average order value of €250, iDEAL costs €875 a year on Shopware Payments, against €406 on Shopify Payments and €448 on Mollie. Run the numbers with your own order value, not the average of the market.
Every iDEAL figure above assumes today's pricing, and that is only guaranteed for a while. Dutch banks are moving iDEAL onto Wero, the European payment wallet of the European Payments Initiative, and Wero has committed to keeping prices at the current iDEAL level until 31 December 2028. What happens after that has not been decided. Wero has confirmed there will be a price cap, but not its level or its structure.
An ING economist quoted by ICT Magazine expects Wero to move to a percentage fee of 0.3% to 0.7% from 2029. That is a projection, not a published tariff, but it is worth running. In our scenario, iDEAL carries €350,000 of revenue. At 0.5%, that becomes €1,750 a year instead of roughly €1,350 to €1,500 today. For a shop with a €75 average order, that is noticeable but manageable.
For high order values the picture changes completely. At a €250 average order, iDEAL currently costs around €400 a year. At 0.5% it would be €1,750, more than four times as much. The break-even logic from the Shopware Payments section then applies to every provider: the higher your orders, the more a percentage hurts. Wero also introduces a dispute process that iDEAL never had, so a customer can contest a payment weeks later. That risk will be priced in somewhere.
None of this calls for drastic action, since prices are frozen until the end of 2028. But it does call for some homework now. Note your current iDEAL cost per transaction, ask your provider in writing what they will charge for Wero after the freeze, and be careful with long contracts that leave the post-2028 price open. If your business runs on large B2B orders, it is also a good moment to look at alternatives for repeat customers, such as payment on invoice or SEPA direct debit.
Transaction fees are only one part of what a payment setup costs you. A few things worth checking alongside the rates.
Before the Q4 peak, take your own payment mix and average order value from last year and run them through the rate cards above. Then add the platform surcharge, if your platform has one. That total, not the headline rate, is the number to compare.
As a Shopware Business Partner and official Alumio partner, Memo builds and connects webshops with the payment providers our clients already work with, from Mollie to PayPal and beyond. Want to know what your payment setup costs in reality, and where it could be leaner? Get in contact with Memo and we will run the numbers for your shop.
Sources
Mollie pricing · Shopify pricing, including third-party transaction fees · Shopify Payments rates in the Netherlands, Klikslim · Shopware Payments pricing · Shopware Payments availability · iDEAL market share, iDEAL.nl · Wero gives Dutch webshops more time, Emerce · Wero set to cost webshops more than iDEAL, ICT Magazine · iDEAL 2.0 and the dispute model, Ecomstream