Payment gateway: choosing how money reaches you

A payment gateway is the service that takes card details from your checkout, passes them for authorisation and returns an answer. For most small businesses it arrives bundled with everything else needed to accept money, which is convenient and makes the pricing difficult to compare — because what is quoted as one rate is usually three or four charges wearing a single number.

What payment gateway pricing actually consists of

• A percentage of each transaction, which is the number everybody quotes.
• A fixed fee per transaction, which dominates the cost on small basket sizes and is routinely overlooked.
• Different rates by card type and origin: commercial cards, cards from other regions and some premium consumer cards cost materially more.
• Monthly platform or gateway fees separate from transaction charges.
• Chargeback fees, applied whether or not the dispute is resolved in your favour.
• Payout timing, which is not a fee but is a cash cost — money held for several days is working capital you are lending.

Gateways, acquirers and the all-in-one option

Historically the gateway, the merchant account and the acquiring bank were separate arrangements, and larger businesses still split them to negotiate each. Modern providers bundle all three, which is why a small business can start accepting payments in an afternoon. The trade is control and rate: bundled pricing is simple and usually higher at volume, while unbundled arrangements reward negotiation and require somebody to do it. The threshold where switching becomes worth it is a volume question — below it, the saving is smaller than the effort.

Check what happens to your customer data and your payment history if you leave. Recurring billing built on stored card details can be portable between providers, but only if the provider supports a migration, and discovering that they do not is a conversation best had before building on them.

What to check before committing

1. Total cost on your actual basket size and card mix rather than the headline rate.
2. Payout schedule and whether any reserve is held, which some providers apply without prominence.
3. Supported payment methods your customers actually use, since regional preferences are strong and card is not universal.
4. The dispute process: how notified, how long to respond, what evidence is accepted.
5. Whether a failed payment can be retried automatically, which materially affects subscription revenue.
6. Contract term and exit terms, because switching providers is work and an auto-renewing term makes it worse.

Ettex Web connects the checkout to the provider you choose, and the orders arrive in the same place as everything else rather than only in a provider dashboard. Where payments are recurring rather than one-off, a bank mandate avoids the failure modes that cards introduce, and many businesses are better off offering both.