Stop Paying a Tax on Every Sale: Why Bringing Your Own Gateway Changes the Math

The fee you don't see on the invoice

When you read a commerce platform's pricing page, you see a monthly subscription number. What you often don't see — until you read the fine print, or until you reconcile a month of payouts — is the second fee: a percentage the platform takes on top of your card processor's fee, on every single order.

It's usually framed as small. "Just 2% if you don't use our payments." Or it disappears entirely if you switch to the platform's own integrated checkout, where the platform sets the processing rate and pockets the spread. Either way, you're paying a tax on revenue that has nothing to do with whether your store had a good month.

BestWebby doesn't work that way. You connect your own Stripe account, customer payments flow directly to you, and BestWebby never takes a percentage of your sales. We charge a flat subscription, and that's the entire relationship. Let's walk through why that distinction is worth real money.

The arithmetic of a percentage fee

Card processing itself is unavoidable — Stripe, Adyen, and every other processor charge roughly 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction in most markets. That's the cost of accepting cards, and no platform makes it disappear.

The platform surcharge is the part that's optional. Suppose you do $40,000/month in sales — a healthy small store — and your platform adds 1.5% on top of processing.

• Platform surcharge at 1.5%: $600/month
• Over a year: $7,200

That $7,200 is pure overhead. It buys you nothing your processor wasn't already providing. And it scales with your success: the better you do, the more you pay, forever.

Now compare that to a flat subscription. Whether you do $40,000 or $400,000 in a month, your platform bill is the same. Every additional dollar of revenue lands in your account minus only the processor's cut — which you'd pay regardless of platform.

Why "own gateway" matters beyond price

Connecting your own gateway isn't only about the surcharge. It changes your relationship with your own money in three ways.

You own the payout relationship. Funds settle into your Stripe account on Stripe's schedule, under your terms. There's no intermediary holding your money, no platform-imposed reserve, no risk that a dispute with your software vendor freezes your cash flow.

You keep your payment history and risk profile. Processors build a fraud and chargeback model around your account over time. When the platform owns the merchant-of-record relationship, that history belongs to them, not you. Switching platforms later means starting that relationship over. With your own gateway, your processing history stays yours.

You control disputes and refunds directly. Chargebacks, evidence submission, and refund timing all happen in an account you control. You're never waiting on a middleman to forward dispute evidence before a deadline.

"But integrated checkout is so easy"

It is. And BestWebby's checkout is just as integrated — your customers never leave your storefront, the payment form is embedded, and the experience is identical to a platform-owned checkout. The difference is purely who the money belongs to and who sets the rate. You get the polished, conversion-optimized checkout without surrendering the economics.

Connecting Stripe takes one OAuth click from Settings → Payments. After that, every order's funds land in your Stripe balance, and your reconciliation matches your Stripe dashboard line for line.

What about Stripe's own fee — can you lower that?

Yes, and it's worth doing. A few levers actually move processing costs:

• Negotiate volume rates. Once you're processing meaningful volume, Stripe and most processors will discuss custom pricing. Ask.
• Reduce international card costs by presenting prices in the customer's local currency where you can, which lowers cross-border and conversion fees.
• Cut chargebacks, which carry their own fees on top of the lost sale. Clear billing descriptors, fast shipping, and proactive order updates are the cheapest fraud and dispute reduction available.

None of these require a platform middleman. They're conversations you have directly with your processor — possible precisely because the gateway is yours.

The bottom line

A percentage surcharge feels small per order and enormous per year. A flat subscription aligns your software cost with the value the software provides, not with how much you sell. Bring your own gateway, pay your processor what cards actually cost, and keep the rest.

Run your own numbers: take last year's revenue, multiply by your platform's surcharge rate, and ask whether that figure bought you anything. For most merchants, it's the easiest margin recovery available — and it doesn't require selling a single additional unit.