Afterpay fees

Shopify Discussion
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Topic summary

Merchants are frustrated with the combined 8% fee structure for offering Afterpay: 6% charged by Afterpay plus an additional 2% from Shopify for using third-party payment providers.

Key concerns raised:

  • Small businesses with 10-15% profit margins find these fees unsustainable, especially when competing with larger corporations that reportedly pay around 3% to Afterpay
  • One merchant contacted Afterpay requesting fee reduction but was denied, with Afterpay stating they cannot negotiate merchant fees
  • Additional frustrations include fees calculated on total order amount (including shipping), rolling reserves of 30% held for 3 months on new businesses, and inability to pass fees onto customers

Disputed details:

  • Some confusion exists about whether the 2% Shopify fee is truly additional or absorbed by Afterpay, with one user claiming it’s charged monthly with store subscription
  • The fee structure reportedly includes both percentage and fixed transaction fees

Potential workarounds mentioned:

  • Exploring alternative third-party payment providers
  • Using Shopify Stripe Checkout or “Easy⇼Pie Shopify Stripe Checkout” to avoid the extra 2% fee
  • Switching to Klarna, which was integrated into Shopify Payments and no longer carries the additional charge

Many merchants are considering removing Afterpay entirely due to unsustainable costs.

Summarized with AI on October 24. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
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their fees are insane. You also have to remember the 8% also includes any shipping which may be based off a real time calculator. So the 8% is even more for some products if basing it off the product margin. It’s actually criminal for small businesses. Then they allow massive corporations to have very low Afterpay fees.

Also, they lie when they say the risk is all theirs. They always keep 30% of the order amount for 3 months on new businesses. They most definitely invest this combined rolling reserve and make astronomical amounts of money off it. If you receive even a single chargeback they will go back to holding 30% of your money and THEY WILL use that money if chargebacks occur. that’s 30% of money that IS NOT THEIRS. It is like if you went to a restaraunt and paid them with visa and someone from VISA took 30% of that restaraunts transaction and just invested it for 3 months…

But you know shopify don’t care. They hate small businesses. They could so easily add a fee surcharge option where we could charge customers the full 6% to use Afterpay but they never will. Check out threads on this. Shopify never respond or they say they are passing it onto the “improvements team”. They side with Afterpay. they know Afterpay would hit back so hard if shopify dared to allow us to pass on Afterpay’s criminal surchage to customers.

This isn’t just Afterpay. It is all BNPL. also it isnt 8%, it’s 8% + the fixed fee per transaction.

All BNPL is criminal and shopify not providing an easy solution for small business to pass on that fee and deter customers from using the criminal BNPL services shows all you need to know about what shopify thinks of small businesses.

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