Payment Processing · Buyer guide
On 1 June 2026 BigCommerce, which had not previously charged for using an outside payment processor, started billing a fee on orders that run through processors outside its approved list: 2% of the order value on its entry plan, 1% on the middle one and 0.6% on the largest self-serve plan. Shopify charges the same kind of fee, at 2%, 1%, 0.6% and 0.2% by plan, on anything other than its own Shopify Payments. Squarespace charges 2% on its cheapest plan whichever processor you use. WooCommerce charges nothing.
None of this appears on your processor's statement. It is billed by the store builder, on its own invoice, on top of whatever your processor charges. We read all four fee schedules on 28 September 2026 and put them on one basis. The short version: on an ordinary credit card sale the platform fee is larger than any saving a cheaper processor can offer on Shopify's two cheaper plans, while on BigCommerce there are usually ways to avoid the fee without giving up a low-cost processor.
Shopify's pricing page lists a third-party transaction fee of 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. It applies to orders paid through any provider other than Shopify Payments, and Shopify's help centre adds three details that make it larger than the headline suggests:
There are exemptions. With Shopify Payments switched on, orders paid by Shop Pay, Shop Pay Installments, PayPal Express Checkout and manual methods such as cash on delivery and bank transfer carry no fee, and point-of-sale orders never do. A Plus store that uses Shopify Payments as its only provider has the fee waived entirely; add a second provider and it applies again. With Shopify Payments switched off, every online order that goes through a third-party provider, PayPal included, carries it.
BigCommerce's version is called the Open Payment Provider Fee, and its 2026 pricing update sets it at 2.0% on Core, 1.0% on Growth and 0.6% on Scale, the plans formerly called Standard, Plus and Pro. Performance stores on contracted terms do not pay it. It is billed monthly in arrears as its own line on your BigCommerce invoice, and BigCommerce says it must not be passed on to shoppers at checkout.
Whether an order is charged depends on which provider actually processed it. BigCommerce publishes a list of 21 Embedded Payment Providers whose orders are fee-free, among them BigCommerce Payments, Stripe, Adyen, Checkout.com, PayPal Braintree, PayPal Wallet, Worldpay, Global Payments, Fortis, BlueSnap and Bankful, plus Klarna, Affirm, Afterpay, Sezzle and Zip for instalments. Everything else is an Open Payment Provider. BigCommerce's own example of an open provider is NMI, and its support article on connecting Authorize.net sends you to the Open tab of the payments settings.
Three details matter. Offering an embedded method at checkout does not help if the customer pays through the open one: BigCommerce's example is a store offering PayPal Wallet alongside cards through NMI, where the card orders are charged. Orders taken outside the platform, including manual and offline methods such as purchase orders, are charged too, which Shopify does not do. And the fee is calculated on what BigCommerce calls Inclusive GMV, gross order value reduced by 10%, so 2% works out to 1.8% of what customers actually paid.
The same update brought sales caps that apply whatever processor you use: Core is for stores with up to $30,000 of Inclusive GMV over the trailing twelve months and Growth up to $100,000, with automatic upgrades beyond those, and Scale charges 0.9% on Inclusive GMV above $33,333 a month. Plan prices are $39, $105 and $399 a month, or $29, $79 and $299 billed annually.
Squarespace's fee depends on the plan rather than the processor. On the newer plans its help centre lists a commerce transaction fee of 2% on Basic and nothing on Core, Plus or Advanced, charged on physical products, services and donations whether you take payment through Squarespace Payments, Stripe or PayPal. Digital products carry a separate fee of 7%, 5%, 1% and 0% on the same four plans. Invoices and pay links carry none. The catch runs the other way: Squarespace only connects Squarespace Payments, Stripe and PayPal online, so there is no bringing your own merchant account at all.
WooCommerce is free, open-source software you host yourself, and its pricing page says you can use any gateway or buy-now-pay-later provider without penalty. There is no platform fee on orders, whether you use WooPayments or connect something else; your costs are hosting and any paid extensions. Independent reviewers report that Wix likewise adds no fee of its own on store sales made through a third-party provider, but we could not find a Wix fee schedule that says so and have not relied on it.
The case for an outside processor is almost always price: interchange-plus pricing, a negotiated rate, or a provider that will take a business the platform's own processor will not. The platform fee has to be paid out of that saving, so the useful question is what the outside processor would need to charge to come out ahead.
Visa publishes the floor. Its interchange table effective 18 April 2026 charges between 1.89% + 10¢ and 2.60% + 10¢ on an ordinary online consumer credit card sale, depending on the card. That money goes to the card-issuing bank, every processor pays it, and it comes before Visa's own network fees and the processor's margin. On a $100 order, interchange alone is $1.99 at the cheapest card.
Now add the platform fee and compare with Shopify Payments' online rate on the same order:
On a premium rewards card at the top of Visa's range the arithmetic is worse: interchange of $2.70 plus a 2% fee is $4.70 on Basic, against Shopify Payments' $3.20. The one place an outside processor can win on a cheaper plan is debit. For debit cards from large banks Visa's table shows the federally capped 0.05% + 21¢, 26 cents on $100, which leaves room for a processor even after a 2% fee. But you do not choose what your customers pay with, and the fee applies to every order equally, so a store's savings have to come from its debit share while the fee comes from all of it.
BigCommerce changes the arithmetic by giving you fee-free choices. Stripe, Adyen, Braintree, Checkout.com and Worldpay are all on its embedded list, so a store that wants interchange-plus pricing can usually get it without paying the fee. The stores it catches are the ones running a traditional merchant account through a gateway such as Authorize.net or NMI, a setup that carried no platform fee on BigCommerce before June.
Take a store with $20,000 a month of online orders, tax and shipping included, all of it processed outside the platform's own payment product. Before any processing cost, the store builder's fee comes to:
Shopify's $400 is a fee the store pays only because it is not using Shopify Payments, and the break-even above shows a cheaper processor cannot earn it back on credit cards. The $400 on Squarespace Basic is the price of the cheapest plan, and moving to Core at $39 a month, or $29 billed annually, removes it.
The fee is avoidable only if the platform's own processor will take you. Shopify's pricing page notes that Shopify Payments is available only in certain countries, and its eligibility page lists cannabis and related products, tobacco, firearms, ammunition and weapons among the categories it cannot support. A seller in one of those categories has to use a high-risk provider, paying both that provider's higher rate and Shopify's fee. Our guides to CBD merchant accounts and firearms merchant accounts cover who underwrites those businesses.
That is where the platforms genuinely differ. Bankful, a gateway that accepts categories the platforms' own processors decline, appears on BigCommerce's embedded list as "Bankful (Pinwheel)", so a declined seller can use it on BigCommerce without the fee. The same seller using the same provider on Shopify pays the third-party fee, and on WooCommerce pays no platform fee at all. For a high-risk store, the choice of store builder can matter as much as the choice of processor.
Fees and plan structures change, and BigCommerce says its embedded list may change over time. The figures here are from each platform's own pricing and help pages as of 28 September 2026.
