Calculating payment methods: what each one costs a shop

Calculating payment methods means knowing, for every method you offer, what it ultimately costs the shop: not just in fees, but also in defaults, chargebacks and work. There is no market figure that answers this for your own shop: only a small part is capped by law, such as the interchange fee for consumer cards, and everything else is determined by contracts, customers and product range. This article shows how online revenue in Germany splits across payment methods, which costs appear in no fee table, explains what the law allows when passing on charges, and describes how to track the cost per payment method in your own online shop.

Which payment methods carry online revenue

The EHI Retail Institute regularly surveys how the revenue of German online retailers is split across payment methods. For 2025, PayPal comes first with 28.7%, followed by purchase on invoice with 26.1% and direct debit with 14.4% (EHI Retail Institute). Credit and international debit cards together reach 13.7% and show the strongest growth of all methods in the ranking (EHI Retail Institute). The basis is a panel of 172 companies with €50.7 billion in net online revenue (EHI Retail Institute).

There is movement in two places in particular: direct debit lost almost three percentage points compared with the previous year, and Apple Pay is listed separately in the ranking for the first time with 1.3% (EHI Retail Institute). For your own calculation, this means that the mix of an individual shop can differ markedly from the market picture, and you calculate with your own.

The revenue shares in the table come from an EHI press release dated May 5, 2026 and are based on the institute's online payment panel (EHI Retail Institute). The column with cost components is a classification for the calculation, not survey data: how much weight each component carries depends on the contract and on your own shop.

The customer perspective completes the picture. In the payment diary of Deutsche Bundesbank for 2025, online payment services are the most used means of payment for purchases on the internet with 50% of payment transactions; measured by revenue, the largest share of 45% goes to direct debits and credit transfers (Deutsche Bundesbank). Among online payment services, PayPal holds a market share of around 86% (Deutsche Bundesbank). These figures come from a survey of private individuals and cannot be offset against the EHI retailer panel. They do show, however, that the share of payment transactions and the share of revenue can be far apart.

An older Bitkom survey shows how firmly habits are set: 42% of online shoppers prefer online payment services, 32% prefer ordering on invoice, while credit card with 11% and direct debit with 7% lag well behind (Bitkom 2022). Anyone who removes a widely used method because it is expensive therefore does not automatically save money. Some orders move to another method, others possibly to another shop. How large that share is can only be measured in your own shop.

Why there is no market price per payment method

There are only a few surveys on the cost per payment method in online retail. According to a report in the trade magazine IT Finanzmagazin, the EHI study “Online-Payment 2026” finds that direct debit is the cheapest method for online retailers, while the two methods with the largest revenue shares, PayPal and purchase on invoice, cause the highest costs; the maximum values determined lie well above the averages (IT Finanzmagazin). An average of this kind does not show where an individual shop stands. Other surveys are of little help. Even Deutsche Bundesbank could only evaluate brick-and-mortar retail in its study on the costs of means of payment: online retailers had been surveyed, but the number of cases was too small for an evaluation (Deutsche Bundesbank). Only a segment is capped by law, above all the interchange fee for consumer cards, more on this below. Everything else results from contracts with payment service providers, from your own risk and from the effort in your operations.

The Bundesbank study does show how a complete cost calculation is structured: it adds up equipment costs, fee and service costs, time spent on administration and checkout, and insurance and losses (Deutsche Bundesbank). For an online shop, checkout equipment largely drops out, while defaults, chargebacks and the reconciliation of aggregated payouts come on top. The principle stays the same: besides the fee, everything else the payment method causes counts toward its cost.

A worked example with assumed values shows why the fee alone is misleading. A shop generates €50,000 a month through one payment method and pays €500 in fees for it, which corresponds to 1.0%. If €300 in defaults, €100 in return fees and chargebacks and €200 in internal effort are added, the costs come to €1,100 and the effective cost rate to 2.2%, more than twice as high as the fee alone. A second method with a 1.8% fee but no default risk can be the cheaper one in the same shop.

The fee is only part of the cost

Anyone who compares only transaction fees usually underestimates the expensive methods and overestimates the cheap ones. The cost of a payment method includes every item that would not arise without it. In most shops, six building blocks come together:

With direct debit, the risk arises mainly after payment. For SEPA Core direct debits, the payer can request a refund from their bank without giving reasons (Section 675x BGB). The claim is only excluded if it is not asserted within eight weeks of the debit (Section 675x BGB). During this period, a paid order is therefore not yet finally paid. For the calculation, what counts is the rate of returned debits, the fees for returns and the effort of collecting outstanding amounts again.

With purchase on invoice handled without a provider, every open invoice ties up capital until the customer pays. A consumer is in default at the latest if they do not pay within 30 days of the due date and receipt of the invoice, and only if the invoice specifically points out this consequence (Section 286 BGB). From then on, default interest of five percentage points above the base rate applies, and nine percentage points in transactions not involving a consumer (Section 288 BGB). Against businesses, a flat fee of €40 is added (Section 288 BGB). Whether these claims cover the effort depends on the individual case; they belong in the calculation just as much as the share of receivables that ultimately defaults. How credit limits for business customers can be managed is described in our article on purchase on account with credit limits.

Card payments: what is regulated and what is not

With cards, part of the cost is capped by law. The interchange fee that flows between the merchant's bank and the card-issuing bank is at most 0.2% of the transaction value for debit card transactions (Regulation (EU) 2015/751). For credit card transactions, the cap is 0.3% of the transaction value (Regulation (EU) 2015/751). The caps do not apply to commercial cards or to cards from three-party schemes (Regulation (EU) 2015/751).

The interchange fee is only one building block, however. What the merchant actually pays is the merchant service charge to its acquirer. The regulation requires acquirers to itemize the amounts of merchant service charges, interchange fees and scheme fees by card category and brand in their agreements with merchants, unless the merchant requests otherwise in writing (Art. 9 Regulation (EU) 2015/751). After each card payment, the merchant also receives the reference, the amount and the fees, with the merchant service charge and the interchange fee shown separately (Art. 12 Regulation (EU) 2015/751).

For the calculation, this is an advantage: anyone who uses these individual records can assign costs precisely by card category instead of working with a blended rate. How detailed other payment methods settle their fees is usually determined by the respective contract. A meaningful settlement includes:

• Fees per payment method and, for cards, per card category and brand
• Individual transactions with reference, amount and fee, so that every payment can be matched to an order
• Chargebacks and returned debits with the fees charged for them
• Refunds and information on which part of the original fee is returned
• Payout schedule and reserves, because they determine how long money is tied up
• Surcharges for foreign currencies and for cards issued abroad

Calculating the cost per method in your own shop

Your own calculation does not require elaborate software, but it does require clean data. In practice, a monthly or quarterly snapshot works well, in which the same figures sit side by side for every payment method. The effective cost rate is then the sum of all attributable costs divided by the revenue that went through this method.

1. Pull revenue and orders per payment method from the shop, separated by country and customer group if the mix differs there.
2. Assign fees: total the settlements of the payment service providers per method and add base and monthly fees proportionally.
3. Record losses: defaults, returned debits and chargebacks with amount and handling fee per method.
4. Estimate internal effort: time for dunning, inquiries and reconciliation, valued at an hourly rate.
5. Allocate fixed costs: spread maintenance of the integration, licenses for extensions and adjustments after updates across the methods that cause them.
6. Calculate the effective rate and compare it across payment methods and with the previous year. Large deviations point to room for negotiation or to a risk that accumulates in the shop.
7. Repeat: the snapshot only becomes meaningful once it runs over several months and a season with peaks.

Where the figures come from in the business

What you may pass on to customers

An obvious idea would be to add a surcharge to expensive methods. The law sets narrow limits on this. An agreement under which customers pay a fee for a SEPA Core direct debit, a SEPA B2B direct debit, a SEPA credit transfer or a payment card is invalid; for cards, this applies to payments by consumers to which the regulation on interchange fees applies (Section 270a BGB).

For other means of payment, a fee charged to consumers is invalid if there is no common and reasonable free payment option or if the fee exceeds the costs the merchant incurs for using the means of payment (Section 312a BGB). Such an additional payment must also be expressly agreed and, in electronic commerce, must not come about through a default setting (Section 312a BGB).

The prohibition on agreeing a fee for the use of a direct debit, credit transfer or payment card within the meaning of Section 270a BGB does not preclude charging a fee for additional services.

Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Court of Justice), press release No. 067/2021 on judgment I ZR 203/19 (own translation)

In 2021, Germany's Federal Court of Justice ruled that companies may charge a fee for payment via Sofortüberweisung or PayPal if it is charged solely for using these services and not for the underlying direct debit, credit transfer or card payment (Bundesgerichtshof). Legally, a surcharge is therefore not ruled out in every case, but in practice it remains tricky: it has to stay within the cost limit, be properly agreed and looks like a price increase at checkout. How the planned EU payment rules change this framework is described in our article on PSD3 and PSR.

Managing the payment mix at checkout

Instead of surcharges, the mix can be managed through the offer itself: which payment method is shown to whom, when and in what order. This is quieter than a fee but requires the same care. A design that deliberately pushes customers in one direction can quickly be perceived as manipulation; our article on dark patterns at checkout shows what to watch out for.

• Order value limits: offer purchase on invoice or installments only from or up to a certain basket value, in line with the risk.
• Customer groups: invoice for existing customers with a clean payment history, prepayment or an instant payment method for large first orders.
• Delivery countries: select payment methods per country so that the methods common there are offered and foreign surcharges do not arise unnoticed.
• Order of display: the arrangement at checkout influences the choice. It should be comprehensible and not simply push the cheapest method to the top.
• Business customers: purchase on invoice with a credit limit and approval instead of across the board, coordinated with accounting.

In Shopware, each payment method can be tied to conditions through an availability rule from the Rule Builder, for example to basket value, billing country or customer group (Shopware documentation). In other shop systems, extensions or custom development take on this task. In any case, it is important that the rules are documented and regularly checked against the key figures. Our Shopware agency supports the implementation in your shop.

The payment step itself also matters. Unnecessary mandatory fields and detours can cost sales regardless of the method chosen; our article on checkout optimization collects starting points. Whether paying directly from a bank account can make the mix cheaper is examined in the article on open banking and A2A. Installment purchases and other forms of paying later come with their own obligations, covered in our article on BNPL regulation.

Tracking key figures per payment method

A one-off calculation quickly goes out of date: terms change, new payment methods are added, and the mix shifts with season and product range. A small set of key figures, updated monthly per payment method, is therefore useful:

• Share of orders and of revenue
• Effective cost rate after all attributable costs
• Rates of defaults, returned debits and chargebacks
• Drop-offs in the payment step, broken down by the method chosen
• Time until the money arrives and capital tied up
• Contribution margin per order by payment method

The data is usually scattered: orders in the shop, fees at the payment provider, defaults and returned debits in accounting. The least manual work arises when payment data flows into accounting automatically, for example via a DATEV integration, and the match to the order happens on import. Anyone who sells on invoice also issues invoices continuously; how Shopware handles this in the ZUGFeRD format is shown in our article on native ZUGFeRD invoices in Shopware.

How we support payment methods and cost calculation

We connect payment providers and classic payment methods such as prepayment, invoice, direct debit and installments to Shopware and other shop systems, and we also implement rules for availability at checkout. For business customers, this includes purchase on invoice, budget approvals and cost centers; details are on our page on B2B e-commerce. For the calculation, we combine order, settlement and accounting data so that the cost per payment method becomes visible with little manual work.

We are happy to discuss which payment methods suit your product range and your customers in a consultation. The basis is your own figures, not a market average.

Managing payment methods by contribution margin

The payment method is a cost factor like shipping and returns and deserves the same attention. The EHI revenue shares show which payment methods carry weight in the market; what they cost a shop only becomes clear from its own settlement data. Anyone who knows revenue shares, effective cost rates and defaults per payment method can negotiate terms in a targeted way, justify rules at checkout and offer expensive methods where they bring in revenue. Our overview of e-commerce solutions shows how we support shops in doing so.