Online Payment Methods for Swiss Stores — TWINT, Cards, PostFinance and QR-bill

Online payment for a Swiss store isn't one service — it's a set of methods: TWINT, a card, a wallet on a phone, an invoice-style QR-bill, and increasingly a buy-now-pay-later option. Each costs something different and fails in its own way, and a method a customer wanted but didn't find usually means the sale went somewhere else.

This article goes through the methods one at a time: how each works, what it costs where a rate is published, and what can go wrong on the merchant's side. The full gateway-by-gateway comparison — setup fees, payouts, disputes — is in our separate article on payment gateway fees. Here we only cite a rate where it distinguishes one method from another.

Why the method mix matters

The most quoted figure on cart abandonment is the Baymard Institute average: 70.22% of carts never become an order (baymard.com, updated 22 September 2025). That's not a measurement Baymard itself ran — it's an average across 50 different studies from 2006 to 2025. Baymard doesn't publish a mobile-only figure, so any "mobile abandonment rate" quoted elsewhere doesn't come from this source, and there's no Swiss-specific study behind it either.

The reasons behind the number matter more than the average itself. In Baymard's own survey of US adult shoppers (excluding people who were "just browsing"), 9% said they abandoned because the store had too few payment methods, 19% because they didn't trust the site enough to enter card details, and 10% because their card was declined. The single biggest reason was extra costs at checkout (40%). The limitations are real: this is a US-market study with no stated sample size or date, and nothing Swiss about it — but the qualitative takeaway travels: missing a payment method, and distrust at the point of entering card data, are real reasons shoppers leave.

TWINT — the method a Swiss checkout is built around

TWINT is a mobile-app payment: the customer picks TWINT at checkout, confirms the amount in the app, and the payment is done — no card number, no bank login on the merchant's site.

What TWINT costs the merchant depends entirely on which gateway or acquirer you use, and the gap is bigger than for cards:

• Stripe CH: 1.9% + CHF 0.30.
• PostFinance Checkout, E-Com Bundle (turnover above CHF 200,000): 1.3% (min. CHF 0.20), plus a CHF 0.18 PSP fee.
• Shopify Payments CH, Basic plan: 1.75% + CHF 0.30.

At every one of these, TWINT undercuts the same provider's card rate — at Stripe CH by a full percentage point (1.9% vs. 2.9%), at PostFinance's E-Com Bundle by a quarter of a point (1.3% vs. 1.55%). If your Swiss customers already have TWINT on their phones, it's one of the few payment-cost levers available without renegotiating anything.

Cards — without the EU's interchange cap or SCA threshold

A card is still the default for customers without TWINT, and for international customers. Swiss card rates run higher than their EU equivalents at the same providers: Stripe CH charges 2.9% + CHF 0.30 for a Swiss card (3.25% + CHF 0.30, plus 2% for currency conversion, for an international one), against 1.5% + €0.25 on Stripe's EU page for a standard EEA card. The CH pricing page does not publish a dispute fee the way the EU page does (€20), so we have no comparable figure to quote for Switzerland.

Three EU rules that shape card economics inside the EU do not simply carry over here, and we say so rather than assume they do:

• No confirmed Swiss interchange cap. The EU's Regulation (EU) 2015/751 caps consumer-card interchange at 0.2–0.3%. We found no Swiss equivalent in the public record.
• No confirmed mandatory SCA threshold. The EU's RTS (EU) 2018/389 exempts online card payments up to EUR 30 from strong authentication. Switzerland has no equivalent mandatory rule that we could confirm — acquirers and card schemes set their own 3-D Secure risk rules domestically, so checkout friction on a Swiss card payment can look different from what the EU rule would produce.
• No confirmed ban on card surcharges. PSD2's Art. 62(4) bars surcharging for EU-regulated cards; we found no matching Swiss rule, though card-network rules (Visa, Mastercard) may still restrict it independently.

Apple Pay and Google Pay — a payment method, or an express checkout

Wallets can be built into a store in two ways. As a plain payment method, the customer completes the whole checkout and only swaps typing a card number for a wallet tap — the fee is the same as for a card. As an express checkout, a wallet button sits on the product page itself, and the address, e-mail and phone number come from the wallet. Stripe's Express Checkout Element is the global product behind this; by default it doesn't pass an e-mail address (you must request it explicitly), the Google Pay button only shows for customers who have it configured, and Apple Pay outside Safari needs extra setup. TWINT is not part of this element in Stripe's own documentation, so an express-checkout wallet button and a TWINT button are two separate pieces of your checkout, not one.

Shopify's equivalent, accelerated checkout buttons, lets a customer skip the cart entirely from the product page; Shop Pay stores the e-mail, payment method and address and claims "up to 50%" higher conversion against a guest checkout — a vendor claim with no stated sample or market, not a result to expect on your own store.

The QR-bill — an invoice-style method, not a card

Switzerland's standardised QR-bill, run by SIX, has been in circulation since June 2020 and definitively replaced the old Swiss payment slip on 1 October 2022 (six-group.com). New requirements have applied since 22 November 2025, and a further change restricting it to structured addresses only is scheduled for November 2026.

For an online store, a QR-bill works like an invoice: the customer gets a bill with a scannable QR code and pays it through their own e-banking, at their own pace, rather than at the moment of checkout. That makes it the Swiss method with the same practical risk profile as cash on delivery in other markets: the store ships (or starts the service) before the payment is certain. We found no merchant-fee figure published for QR-bill processing as a standalone method — it's typically bundled into an invoicing or accounting workflow rather than priced as a transaction fee the way a card or TWINT is.

Buy now, pay later — options exist, merchant pricing mostly doesn't

Two Swiss BNPL providers describe their consumer offer clearly, but neither publishes a merchant fee we could confirm:

• Swissbilling (swissbilling.ch): invoice payment, 0% financing for up to 48 months, and "pay later with TWINT… within 30 days". Merchant fees are not public.
• Powerpay (powerpay.ch): a monthly-invoice model with 12% annual interest on instalment balances for the customer. Merchant fees are not public.

Both describe the consumer side in detail — what the shopper pays, or doesn't — without saying what the merchant is charged for offering it. We're stating that gap rather than guessing a number, and neither appears with a cost figure in the comparison table below.

Choosing methods, cost and risk together

The table below shows each method's cost at an example CHF 100 order (illustrative, using the published rate from the provider named — your own contract may differ), and the risk it carries for the merchant.

How to put this together for your own store:

1. Make TWINT the default, not an afterthought. It undercuts cards at every provider we checked.
2. Add cards for international customers, and budget for the dispute risk — we found no published Swiss dispute-fee figure, so ask your provider directly rather than assuming it matches an EU number.
3. Check whether your wallet implementation is a plain method or an express checkout — that's what decides whether a phone customer gets a shorter path.
4. Treat the QR-bill as an invoicing decision, not a checkout toggle — it suits B2B and trust-based relationships more than impulse retail, and its merchant cost isn't published the way a transaction fee is.
5. If you add BNPL, don't expect published merchant pricing from the Swiss-specific providers — rely only on what your own provider confirms.
6. On a SaaS platform, check the gateway surcharge before comparing providers — see payment gateway fees for the Shopify CH numbers.

To run these costs together with subscription, hosting and maintenance costs over several years, use our e-commerce TCO calculator or the online store cost calculator. If you sell on a marketplace as well, marketplace integration explains how payment handling changes there.