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Online payment fees: what you actually keep
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Online payment processing fees decide how much actually lands in your account on every sale. On a 100 € payment, you keep 98.25 € with Stripe (1.5% + €0.25), 97.50 € with SumUp (2.5%) and 96.25 € with PayPal (3.40% + €0.35), according to the official fee schedules checked on November 10, 2026. And that's only the first line: a refund doesn't give you that fee back, and a dispute costs even more.
How much each provider keeps on an online payment
Three providers publish a fee schedule you can actually check for card payments online: Stripe, the gateway behind most custom-built checkouts; PayPal, the method customers pick most often on their side; and SumUp, built for sellers who start from a payment link rather than a full shopping cart.
| Provider | Fee on a standard European card |
|---|---|
| Stripe | 1.5% + €0.25 |
| SumUp (online payments) | 2.5% |
| PayPal (commercial, Italy) | 3.40% + €0.35 |
Nexi, another name that comes up constantly in Italian quotes, isn't in this comparison: at the time of writing it doesn't publish a checkable online fee schedule for XPay Link, and the figures circulating are expired promotions or third-party comparison pages. Where a number has no primary source, it's not here.
What's actually left of a 100 € sale
Applying the rates above to a 100 € sale, the gap between the cheapest and the most expensive provider is €1.50, just under 1.5% of the sale itself.
| Provider | Fee on €100 | Left over |
|---|---|---|
| Stripe | €1.75 | €98.25 |
| SumUp | €2.50 | €97.50 |
| PayPal | €3.75 | €96.25 |
On a single sale, that looks small. On an online store processing €10,000 a month in card payments, the same gap between Stripe and PayPal is worth €150 a month: it's why it's worth recalculating on your own typical revenue instead of trusting the percentage alone. The full breakdown of an online store's fixed and variable costs, of which this is only one line, is in how much does an e-commerce site cost.
On small sales, the fixed fee weighs more
The fixed part of these fees (€0.25 for Stripe, €0.35 for PayPal) doesn't scale with the amount, so it weighs far more, proportionally, on a small payment. On a €10 payment, Stripe keeps €0.40 (an effective 4%), against €1.75 on a €100 payment (1.75%): the effective rate more than doubles.
Working out the break-even point between Stripe and SumUp from these two rates, it lands at €25: below that threshold SumUp's flat 2.5% costs less than Stripe's fixed fee, above it the opposite is true. Anyone selling mostly low-ticket items would do well to check this crossover before choosing, rather than just picking the lowest headline percentage.
A refund doesn't give you the fee back
A point few people check before switching on a gateway: if you refund a customer, the fee you paid to receive that payment stays with you. Both fee schedules say so: Stripe states that "processing [...] fees on the original transaction are not refunded"; PayPal states that "fees previously paid to receive the payment will not be returned," for both full and partial refunds.
In practice, refunding a €100 Stripe sale in full doesn't bring that sale back to zero cost: €1.75 in fees are already gone, even though the customer got every cent back. It isn't a hidden penalty, it's written in the fee schedule: but it's the line you read after you've already handled the return, not before.
A dispute costs more than a plain refund
If the customer doesn't ask for a refund but opens a dispute with their bank or with PayPal instead, the math changes again. On Stripe, the fee for a dispute received is €20, never refunded under any circumstance. Since June 17, 2025, there's also a second fee, due only if you choose to formally counter it: another €20, refunded only if you win. In the worst case, countering and losing, a single dispute ends up costing €40, on top of the goods themselves.
On PayPal the figures are different and apply to two distinct channels, not two tiers of the same event: €14 when the payment went through the buyer's PayPal balance, €16 in chargeback fees when it was instead a card not linked to a PayPal account. Either way, the fee stacks on top of what you already paid to receive the original payment.
What to check beyond the headline percentage
When I look at a payment gateway's fee schedule, the first line I check isn't the percentage on the homepage: it's what happens on a refund and on a dispute, because those are the events a first quote never shows and that come up anyway, sooner or later, on any store that sells for a full year. The percentage sets the ordinary cost; refunds and disputes set the cost of the exception.
If you're still weighing whether to open an online store, these numbers are only one line of the full bill: the rest, from the platform to the advertising budget, is in how much does an e-commerce site cost. If you already have the store and want to sell without surprises on the real costs, the terms are on the sell your products and services online page.