Following every Black Friday Cyber Monday, revenue records make headlines. Adobe tracked $44.2 billion in US online sales across the 5-day Cyber Week window in 2025, up 7.7% year over year. But what doesn’t make headlines is how much you pay in fees to process all those transactions. Payments are the largest, least-examined cost of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Here’s what peak-volume sales cost you, and how to keep more of it.
Why your best week is also your most expensive
↑ Back to topSay you spend months negotiating your processor down from 2.5% to 2.1%. You take that rate into Cyber Week, see $2M in sales, and your processing costs go up by $3,167. When you look into it, you find that your new rate was in place, but your platform charged you for using it.
Gateway fees that tax your success
There are two important line items to examine in your Cyber Week statement. The first is what it costs to move money; things like interchange, network assessments, and your processor’s markup. Every store on every platform pays some version of this, and it often scales with your sales volume.
The second is the gateway fee, a surcharge your platform adds when you use a processor it doesn’t own or approve of. It’s typically a percentage of your gross sales. You’re essentially paying your platform for the privilege of routing through your chosen processor. Here’s what you might see from Shopify, BigCommerce, and Wix.
- Shopify
- Native rate (US): 2.9% – 2.5% + $0.30, by plan
- Third-party getaway fee: 2% – 0.2%, by plan
- BigCommerce
- Native rate (US): 2.89% – 2.39% + $0.30, by plan
- Third-party getaway fee: 2% – 0%, Open Payment Providers only*
- Wix
- Native rate (US): 2.9% + $0.30 (cards)
- Third-party getaway fee: $0 for standard stores; 2% – 4% for stores that sell memberships, pricing plans, or recurring payments through Wix
Here’s what this looks like in practice. Say you’re on Shopify Basic, paying the plan’s flat 2% third-party gateway fee. On a typical $150,000 month, that’s around $3,000. But during Cyber Week when sales spike to $600,000, a realistic jump for a lot of seasonal retailers, that same 2% suddenly adds up to $12,000 in a single week.
Caps on third-party payment providers
As your store grows in sales volume, you begin to have more leverage to negotiate rates. But if you’d like to work with multiple third-party payment providers, some closed platforms limit you. For example, Shopify’s Help Center states that a store can use only 1 direct third-party payment provider alongside Shopify Payments at a time. So, if you want a negotiated rate, a backup payment processor, or want to set up multi-gateway routing, you hit a wall.
The math: Payment processing fees by the numbers
↑ Back to topHere’s what that looks like for a real Cyber Week. Try putting your numbers into these scenarios to see how the math would work out for you.
Let’s use “Brand X,” a hypothetical ecommerce business running on Shopify Advanced ($399/mo), processing $2 million over the 5-day Cyber Week window at a $120 average order value. That adds up to about 16,667 orders.
Scenario A: Brand X stays on Shopify Payments, no negotiation. At Shopify Advanced’s native rate of 2.5% plus $0.30 per order, that’s 2.5% of $2,000,000 ($50,000), plus $0.30 across 16,667 orders ($5,000 more). Total: $55,000.
Scenario B: Brand X negotiates a direct processor rate — 2.1% plus $0.25 per order — and routes it through Shopify as a third-party gateway. The processor itself costs $46,167. Shopify’s Advanced-tier third-party surcharge adds another 0.6% of the full $2 million: $12,000. Total: $58,167. $3,167 more, despite negotiating a better rate.
Scenario C: Brand X moves to WooCommerce and keeps the same negotiated rate, routed through its own chosen gateway. There’s no platform surcharge on WooCommerce. The processor cost is $46,167.
Brand X did the work of negotiating a better rate, and ended up paying more for it on a platform that charges extra for third-party gateways. But saved $8,833 by switching from Shopify Payments to WooCommerce.
How the platforms compare
| Platform | Native rate (US) | Third-party gateway fee | Platform subscription |
| WooCommerce | 2.9% + $0.30 (WooPayments) | $0 | $0 |
| Shopify | 2.9% – 2.5% + $0.30, by plan | 2% – 0.2%, by plan | $39 – $399+/mo |
| BigCommerce | 2.89% – 2.39% + $0.30, by plan | 2% –0%, Open Payment Providers only* | $39 – $399+/mo |
| Wix | 2.9% + $0.30 (cards) | $0 for standard stores; 2% – 4% for stores that sell memberships, pricing plans, or recurring payments through Wix | Varies by plan |
*Most major processors, including Stripe, PayPal, Klarna, and Affirm, are BigCommerce’s fee-free “Embedded” partners. The surcharge applies only to processors outside that list.
It’s worth noting that a self-hosted store on WooCommerce does come with some costs. Hosting, security, extensions, and upkeep aren’t bundled the way they are on a SaaS subscription. But you’re looking at something like $175 per month, depending on your setup. Estimate your store’s costs using our TCO calculator.
What are composable payments, and why they’re the future
Making your payments “composable” essentially means you interchangeably add, swap, or run gateways side by side as your business changes, without switching platforms or renegotiating your whole stack to do it.
Woo doesn’t charge a platform fee for this; you can choose your own gateway and change them out without any penalty.
Let’s say you’re a hybrid retailer running the same processor across your point-of-sale system and your online store. For this example, let’s say it’s Square. When you set up Square as your POS on WooCommerce, you won’t hit a wall or a surcharge, because there was never a fee attached to the choice in the first place.
Same goes for when you’re using several gateways. Stripe, Square, Mollie, PayPal, Klarna, and plenty more integrate directly with WooCommerce, and don’t cost extra to use together. That’s what makes multi-gateway routing practical: when adding a second gateway costs nothing, running several specialized processing setups just becomes a normal way to run your store.
Keep more of your BFCM revenue
↑ Back to topThe size of your Black Friday shouldn’t determine the size of your payment processor’s cut of it. Right now, on most platforms, it does: fees and surcharges climb right alongside your best sales days, and negotiating a better rate only helps if your platform doesn’t charge you for using it.
Composable payments — the kind that don’t quietly cost more just because you grew — are what let you keep what a record weekend actually earns you.
Ready to see how much you can save this holiday sales season? Learn more about switching to WooCommerce →
Feeling stuck with your ecommerce solution? Let’s talk.
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