Payment Processing · Industry
If you sell to customers in the Netherlands, iDEAL is probably your most important payment method after cards, and possibly ahead of them. The European Payments Initiative, which bought iDEAL, says it carries about 72% of Dutch e-commerce transactions, around 1.5 billion a year, at more than 350,000 businesses. Stripe's pricing page puts its share of Dutch online payments at more than 60%. The two figures measure different things and were published at different times, but on either one it is the default way a Dutch shopper pays.
That default is being switched off. iDEAL is being folded into Wero, a wallet the same banks are rolling out across Europe, and the target date for the end of iDEAL is 31 December 2027. For shoppers little changes: they still pay through their own bank. For merchants, three things change: customers gain the right to dispute a payment, subscriptions get a new mechanism, and the per-payment price, fixed and small today, is only guaranteed until the end of 2028. We read the scheme's announcements, the Dutch banks' merchant pages and the pricing and documentation of Stripe, Mollie and Adyen on 26 September 2026.
The migration runs in stages, and the dates below come from the Dutch Payments Association, EPI and ABN AMRO's page for business clients with an iDEAL contract.
You do not have to move on day one. ABN AMRO tells its merchants they can choose when to switch within that window. Your payment provider will set the practical deadline, because it has to move its own integration first.
An iDEAL payment is final. Stripe's documentation is blunt about it: "Customers can't dispute iDEAL | Wero payments with their bank." That finality is a large part of why Dutch merchants like iDEAL, and it is the biggest thing Wero changes.
Wero comes with purchase protection. ABN AMRO describes it as a consumer right that a merchant cannot switch off, unless the business's merchant category is excluded. A customer can use it when the goods were not delivered or do not match what was agreed, and must first try to resolve the problem with the merchant. If that fails, the request goes through the customer's bank, the merchant answers it in a secure environment, and an investigation may follow. ABN AMRO says costs only arise if a claim is decided against you: you may have to refund part or all of the payment, and your payment provider may charge its own fees.
The protection arrives in two steps, and the order matters for anyone selling across borders:
In practice this means a Dutch merchant can keep taking iDEAL-style final payments from Dutch customers until the end of 2027. A shop selling to Belgian, French or German Wero users is already taking payments those customers can dispute. If you have never had to answer a chargeback on a bank payment, the habits that win card disputes carry over: proof of delivery, clear terms and a quick refund when something has gone wrong.
What processors charge when a customer disputes a card payment is in our guide to chargeback and dispute fees by processor.
iDEAL has never really done recurring payments. The usual workaround is to take the first payment by iDEAL and use it to set up a SEPA Direct Debit mandate for the rest. Stripe says subscriptions set up that way run on SEPA rails and "will not be affected" if you turn iDEAL off at checkout, and that Wero will have its own subscriptions mechanism launching in 2027.
So existing subscribers are safe. The question is how you sign up new ones once iDEAL disappears. Until Wero's subscription product exists, a Dutch subscription business needs another way to capture the mandate, and it should ask its provider which one it will support.
iDEAL is cheap. It has always been priced as a flat amount per payment, not a percentage, which is why it undercuts cards on anything but the smallest orders. What three providers publish, as of 26 September 2026:
On a €100 order that is 29 to 33 cents by iDEAL against €1.75 at Stripe's card rate or €2.05 at Mollie's. Mollie's separate Wero line shows where cross-border selling sits: a €100 payment on its "all other countries" line costs €1.15, against 32 cents on its domestic Dutch line.
EPI has committed that "Wero scheme pricing will remain broadly aligned with the current iDEAL | Wero pricing level until 31 December 2028". That is a promise about the scheme's own fee to banks and payment providers. It does not cap what your provider charges you. Stripe says it aims "to accommodate transition pricing" for merchants switching from iDEAL to Wero, and that custom pricing on Wero may require a contract amendment.
After 2028 it is open. ICT Magazine reported on 4 September that Wero will move from a fixed fee to a percentage of the transaction from 2029, and that Wero says there will be a cap but could not yet say how high or in what form. The only figure in circulation is an estimate: ING sector economist Dirk Mulder expects Wero to cost between 0.3% and 0.7%. The same report quotes the chief operating officer of Dutch web shop XXL Nutrition saying its iDEAL costs of about €35,000 a year would rise to more than €200,000 at 0.5%.
Treat those as forecasts, not prices. What can be said is that a flat fee of around 30 cents and a percentage of 0.3% to 0.7% cross at an order value of roughly €40 to €100. Below that a percentage is cheaper, and above it a percentage costs more, by a widening margin. A merchant with large average orders has the most to lose, and the cap will decide how much.
Stripe is one of the few ways a business outside Europe can offer iDEAL at all. Its iDEAL | Wero documentation lists the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and several other non-European countries among the business locations that can accept it. A US Stripe account pays $0.80 a payment, plus 1.5% for an international transaction and 1% if currency conversion is needed, so a $100 order from a Dutch customer costs $3.30. That is still well under what a card from the same customer would cost: our guide to foreign card fees for US merchants explains how those add up.
Stripe's separate Wero documentation is different. As of 26 September 2026 it lists only European business locations: the EU countries plus Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. It lists Belgian, French and German customers, not Dutch ones yet (Stripe's migration FAQ says Dutch consumers should follow at the end of 2026), and the method is in preview behind a request-access form. Stripe's instruction for iDEAL users is to switch to Wero "to continue accepting bank redirects payments from customers in the Netherlands". Neither page says what a US or UK account should do when iDEAL ends. If Dutch customers are a meaningful share of your sales from outside Europe, ask Stripe before 2027 rather than after.
Wero is not only a Dutch story. EPI launched Wero for online payments in Germany on 17 November 2025, through the Sparkassen and the Volksbanken and Raiffeisenbanken, and in Belgium on 3 March 2026, where it builds on the Payconiq wallet. Groupe BPCE completed the first online Wero payments in France in April 2026. EPI said in July that Wero's person-to-person payments serve 56 million users across Belgium, France and Germany. Its German launch listed Stripe, Worldline, Nexi and Nuvei among the acquirers and partners supporting it. For a merchant selling across the region, one bank-payment method covering the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and France would replace several local ones, which is the scheme's case for itself. Wero is one of several routes to paying from a bank account; our overview of pay by bank for merchants covers how the US equivalents work.
