With the RBA’s card surcharge ban kicking in from 1 October, I’m trying to work out what other Australian merchants are actually doing to recover card processing costs, beyond just quietly raising prices across the board.
A bit of context on where we’ve landed so far:
We’re currently paying around $22k/year in card fees, and losing the ability to surcharge that at checkout.
We looked at PayTo as the obvious lower-cost alternative, but on Shopify it’s turned into a bigger rabbit hole than expected, Shopify Payments doesn’t support PayTo at all, so we’ve had to look at third-party apps (Volt, Quidkey) as “additional payment providers,” which then get hit with Shopify’s own third-party transaction fee (2% on Basic, down to 0.6% on Advanced) stacked on top of the provider’s fee. On our plan, that stack ends up costing about the same as just eating the card fees.
We can’t get to Stripe’s PayTo rate directly either, because Shopify blocks Stripe as a standalone gateway in any country where Shopify Payments is already available, even though Shopify Payments is Stripe under the hood.
Genuinely can’t believe Shopify Payments isn’t offering PayTo natively in Australia given they’re already running on Stripe’s infrastructure and Stripe has supported PayTo for a while now. Feels like a no-brainer that’s just… not been built.
So,a few questions for other AU merchants going through this:
Are you just building the cost into your base prices, or doing something smarter (e.g. a discount for customers who pay via bank transfer/PayTo instead of card)?
Has anyone actually got Volt, Quidkey, or another PayTo app working on Shopify, and is the fee math actually working out for you once you factor in Shopify’s third-party surcharge?
Is anyone running PayTo through a workaround, e.g. a manual payment method automated via Xero/Stripe/Zapier,rather than a standard “additional payment provider” app, specifically to avoid Shopify’s surcharge?
Has anyone heard anything from Shopify (support, partner channels, roadmap comments) about native PayTo support for Shopify Payments in Australia? Feels like exactly the kind of thing that should already be on their radar given the regulatory deadline.
Would really appreciate hearing what’s actually working for other stores rather than just theorising, happy to share more detail on what we’ve found if it’s useful to others in the same boat.
Hi @Ellemw
That’s a pretty significant amount in card fees, so I can see why simply increasing prices across the board isn’t an ideal solution. The PayTo + third-party transaction fee combination also seems to take away a lot of the potential savings.
I’d be really interested to hear whether anyone has found a way to offer a small incentive for PayTo/bank transfer payments while keeping the checkout experience simple. Hopefully Shopify also provides native PayTo support before the October deadline.
We’re facing the same issue. Adding Shopify’s third-party fee can wipe out most of the savings from PayTo, so pricing adjustments or small incentives for cheaper payment methods may be simpler. Would be great to hear if anyone has found a PayTo setup that actually saves money on Shopify.
On the incentive front, a few merchants in this thread and elsewhere seem to be handling it with a manual discount code tied to a “bank transfer” or “PayTo” payment method, rather than trying to build differential pricing into checkout itself. Shopify’s checkout doesn’t let you show different prices per payment method natively, so the workaround is usually: customer selects PayTo/bank transfer, gets a discount code (either automatically applied via a checkout extension, or manually via a banner/email), and you eat the small discount instead of the card fee. Nets out similar to what surcharging card payments would achieve, without touching the price shown to everyone else.
The catch is exactly what you flagged, if the third-party PayTo integration adds its own fee on top, the margin you’re trying to protect gets eaten from both directions. A few people have said the math only works if the incentive is modest (1–1.5%) and the third-party fee is genuinely lower than card interchange, which isn’t true for every provider.
On native support, I haven’t seen anything from Shopify confirming first-party PayTo before the deadline either. Worth keeping an eye on their changelog/status page directly rather than relying on forum chatter, since a native integration would presumably route around the third-party fee problem entirely. If anyone’s spotted a roadmap mention I’d love a link.
Agree on the effective-cost point, it’s easy to see a PayTo provider advertise something like “0.5%” and assume that’s a clear win over card fees, but once Shopify’s third-party transaction fee stacks on top (since PayTo apps aren’t Shopify Payments), the real gap narrows fast, and for lower-margin catalogs it can flip to not worth the switching effort at all. Anyone comparing options should be asking providers for the all-in rate including that stacked fee, not just their headline number.
On the incentive question, the merchants I’ve seen mention success with this are doing it via a discount code tied to the bank transfer/PayTo option at checkout (either surfaced automatically through a checkout extension or manually offered), rather than differential catalog pricing, since Shopify checkout doesn’t natively support showing different prices by payment method. Keeping the incentive small (people have mentioned 1–1.5%) seems to be the sweet spot, enough to nudge behavior without giving away more than the card fee you’re avoiding.
The Australian surcharge rule changes make this more pressing than it would otherwise be, since merchants who’ve been quietly passing on card costs via blanket price increases are going to need a cleaner mechanism soon regardless.
On native PayTo for Shopify Payments AU, I haven’t seen any confirmation either, and it’s a fair ask given Shopify Payments merchants presumably don’t want to bolt on a third-party app just to offer it. Worth watching Shopify’s official changelog rather than forum speculation, but if anyone here has heard something concrete from Shopify support or a partner rep, that’d be worth surfacing.
This is a genuinely useful breakdown, thanks for laying it out in buckets like that.
The Shopify Plus mention is worth flagging for anyone reading this who’s on the fence: waived third-party fees only helps if Shopify Payments is your primary gateway and PayTo is layered in alongside it rather than replacing it, worth double-checking with Shopify directly whether a PayTo app still counts as “third-party” in that context even on Plus, since that distinction could make or break the math for merchants considering the upgrade purely to fix this.
On the manual bank transfer point, completely agree that reconciliation becomes the real cost at any meaningful volume. It’s easy to underestimate how much staff time goes into matching payments to orders and chasing unconfirmed transfers once you’re past a handful of orders a week. At $22k/year in card fees, that’s clearly enough volume that “save the fee, spend the labor” isn’t a real saving.
Good call on treating the native PayTo question as unconfirmed rather than assumed, Stripe supporting something in Australia is a separate question from Shopify Payments exposing it, and conflating the two is an easy mistake in threads like this.
Worth adding one data point from this thread: the math seems to actually work when order values are high enough that PayTo’s percentage-based savings outweigh the flat third-party fee, a few people upthread mentioned it makes more sense for higher-value or recurring orders rather than typical low-ticket checkout traffic. If your average order value is on the lower end, the third-party fee is proportionally bigger and eats the savings faster, which lines up with what you’re seeing.
On setups that “actually save money”, nobody in this thread has posted a confirmed net-positive setup yet, mostly just the framework for calculating it (provider rate + Shopify’s third-party fee + refund/failure handling, compared against the effective card rate you’re currently paying). It might be worth posting your actual numbers here, average order value, card fee %, and the specific PayTo provider’s rate, since a few people seem to have run this math for their own stores and might be able to tell you quickly whether it clears the bar or not.
The other variable is Shopify Plus, mentioned above, third-party fees are reportedly waived there when Shopify Payments stays primary, though that’s a bigger commitment just to fix a fee stacking problem and only pencils out if the platform cost difference is smaller than what you’re losing to fees.