If you have ever integrated a payment gateway, you know the SDK is the easy part. The pricing page is where the real complexity hides, and almost none of it shows up in the docs you read while wiring up a checkout.
Here are the four things that actually matter once real money starts moving.
1. Your Rate Is Three Numbers Wearing a Trench Coat
The single percentage you see advertised is three separate fees stacked together.
Interchange is the largest piece and it goes to the bank that issued your customer's card. Visa and Mastercard set it, and nobody in the chain can discount it. In the US it runs from roughly 1.65 percent plus 10 cents on a basic debit card to about 2.40 percent plus 10 cents on a premium rewards card. The effective average for ecommerce lands around 1.8 to 2.1 percent.
Assessments are the card network's own take, about 0.13 to 0.14 percent. Also fixed.
Processor markup is the only piece anyone can actually negotiate. On a flat rate plan it is invisible, folded into the advertised number.
Run the math on a $100 order paid with a rewards card and you get about $2.10 interchange, $0.14 assessment, and $0.25 to $0.50 markup. Call it $2.49 to $2.74. That same order on a 2.9 percent plus 30 cents flat rate costs $3.20.
2. An Approval Is Not Money
The auth round trip, gateway to processor to card network to issuing bank and back, takes about two seconds. What you get back is an authorization, a promise that the funds exist and are reserved.
Settlement is a separate event, usually batched at the end of the business day. This is why your bank deposits never match your daily sales figures, and it is the single most common source of confusion when someone builds their first reconciliation job. If your ledger assumes approved equals deposited, it will drift from day one.
Design for the gap. Store the auth and the settlement as distinct states, and expect the second one to arrive later, sometimes partially, sometimes not at all.
3. Onboarding Speed Is a Risk Trade
Signing up with Stripe, PayPal or Square takes minutes because you are not getting a merchant account. You are being aggregated under theirs. There is no underwriting, no credit check, no monthly minimum.
The cost of that is the risk profile. Because you share the facilitator's account, their automated systems can hold or freeze your funds when something looks unusual, and your appeal path is a support queue.
A traditional merchant account is underwritten specifically for your business. Three to seven days of setup, monthly minimums, statement fees, and interchange-plus pricing where you pay real interchange plus a known markup. Above roughly $20,000 a month in volume, interchange-plus usually wins even after the fixed costs. Below it, the flat rate is honestly a fair price for not having to think about any of this.
4. The Number Nobody Computes
Ask any store owner what they pay and you will get the headline rate. Ask what their effective rate was last month, total fees divided by total volume, and you will usually get a pause.
That single number is the only fair way to compare two processors, because it absorbs the mix of card types your customers actually use, the fixed monthly fees, and every line item you forgot was on the statement. The complete breakdown of gateways, fee structures, settlement and PCI scope walks through the rest of it.
The Takeaway
Do not shop for a lower interchange rate, because it does not exist. Compare markup, weigh the fixed costs against your real volume, and build your reconciliation around the fact that authorization and settlement are two different events that happen at two different times.
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