Payment Gateway Fees for Swiss Online Stores — Stripe, PostFinance and Shopify Payments Compared

A payment gateway is the service your store uses to accept cards, TWINT and other methods — and it takes a fee on every one of those payments. In Switzerland that fee depends heavily on which method the customer picks: at every provider we checked, TWINT costs the merchant less than a card, often by more than a full percentage point.

This article compares the standard published rates of Stripe Switzerland, PostFinance Checkout and Shopify Payments CH, as read on 30 September 2026, each one linked to its source. One thing worth knowing up front: several EU payment rules you may have read about elsewhere — the interchange cap, the ban on card surcharges, the SCA authentication threshold — are EU law. We could not confirm a Swiss equivalent for any of them, and we say so rather than assume one.

What a payment gateway is, and what the fee is made of

A payment gateway (payment service provider) sits between your customer, their bank or card issuer, and your bank account. The customer picks a card, TWINT or another method at checkout, the gateway authorises the payment, confirms it to your store, and — on its own settlement schedule — pays the money into your account.

The rate on a gateway's price list bundles several things that you rarely see broken out separately: what goes to the card network or TWINT's own scheme, and what the gateway keeps as margin for running the service, screening for fraud, and handling settlement and support. We could not find a Swiss equivalent of the EU's regulated interchange cap in the public record for this review — Swiss merchant rates look like they reflect the acquirer's own pricing more directly, which may be part of why a standard Swiss card rate (2.9% at Stripe) runs noticeably higher than the equivalent EU card rate (1.5% at Stripe) — in the EU it's the interchange underneath that rate that's capped, not the gateway's own published rate. That comparison is solid — both figures are from Stripe's own pricing pages — but the explanation for the gap is ours, not a cited regulatory fact.

A gateway isn't the same thing as the set of payment methods you offer. Which methods to support and what each one costs for a Swiss store is covered in our separate article on online payment methods. This one is about the cost and terms of the provider itself.

Gateway rates for Swiss merchants — Stripe, PostFinance and Shopify Payments

¹ PostFinance's All-in-One page states the transaction rate as a flat "2.5%, at least CHF 0.20" without breaking it out by method, so that flat rate is shown in both columns above. The E-Com Bundle row below gives the actual per-method split (PostFinance Pay/TWINT 1.3%, Visa/Mastercard 1.55%).

A few notes on reading this table:

• TWINT is consistently the cheaper method. At PostFinance's E-Com Bundle it's 1.3% against 1.55% for cards; at Stripe it's 1.9% against 2.9%; at Shopify Payments Basic it's 1.75% against 2.95%. If your Swiss customers already have TWINT on their phones, steering them to it over a card is one of the few payment-cost levers that doesn't require renegotiating anything.
• Shopify's Swiss pricing page only confirms a 2% third-party-gateway surcharge on the Basic plan. Unlike the EU page, which publishes 1% / 0.6% / 0.2% for Grow / Advanced / Plus, the Swiss page doesn't state the higher-tier rates — ask Shopify directly if you're above Basic.
• Shopify Plus is still priced in euros on the Swiss pages ("Ab 2.100 € EUR/Monat" on the German-language CH page) — an odd detail worth knowing if you're comparing Plus against the CHF-denominated lower tiers.

Why the fixed fee matters more than the headline percentage

At CHF 25, Stripe's CHF 0.30 fixed fee is already a meaningful share of the total; at CHF 350 the percentage dominates and the fixed fee barely moves the number. PostFinance's PSP fee (CHF 0.18) behaves the same way, on top of a lower headline percentage. If your average order is small, compare providers on your own basket size rather than on the percentage printed at the top of the pricing page.

EU payment rules that do not simply carry over to Switzerland

Switzerland is outside the EU and EEA, and several rules that shape payment-gateway pricing inside the EU are EU law, not Swiss law:

• No confirmed Swiss interchange cap. The EU's Regulation (EU) 2015/751 caps consumer-card interchange at 0.2–0.3% of the transaction. We found no Swiss equivalent in the public record for this review. If you sell into the EU as well as Switzerland, that EU-side leg of a transaction may still be subject to the EU cap — check with your acquirer rather than assuming either way.
• No confirmed ban on card surcharges. PSD2's Article 62(4) bars surcharging for EU-regulated card payments; we found no matching Swiss rule. Card-network rules (Visa, Mastercard) may still restrict surcharging independently of national law — check your merchant agreement.
• No confirmed mandatory strong-customer-authentication threshold. The EU's RTS (EU) 2018/389 sets a EUR 30 exemption for low-value online card payments; Switzerland has no equivalent mandatory rule that we could confirm. Acquirers and card schemes set their own 3-D Secure risk rules domestically, which is why checkout friction for a Swiss card payment can differ from what the EU rule would produce.

Choosing a gateway in six steps

1. Work out your average basket. Below roughly CHF 25–30, the fixed fee dominates; above a few hundred francs, the percentage does. Run your own basket through the worked example above.
2. Check which methods you need. TWINT is materially cheaper than cards at every provider in this comparison — make sure your gateway supports it before comparing card rates alone. See our payment methods guide for the full breakdown.
3. Add up what the headline rate doesn't show. Currency conversion on international cards, the PSP fee PostFinance adds on top of its percentage, and — on Shopify — the third-party-gateway surcharge.
4. Confirm settlement and payout terms directly with the provider. We could not confirm a published payout schedule for Stripe CH or PostFinance from their public pages; ask for your account's specific terms.
5. Check what your store platform charges on top. Shopify's third-party surcharge is confirmed at 2% on Basic in Switzerland; higher-tier Swiss rates were not published where we checked.
6. Keep an alternative integrated. A second gateway is insurance against an outage, a frozen account, or a rate increase. Revisit the comparison once a year, or whenever a provider changes its price list.

To see gateway and platform costs together over several years, use our e-commerce TCO calculator. If you're still planning the store itself, the online store cost calculator includes payment integration in the starting cost. For the rest of the payments and logistics picture, see payments and logistics.