Stripe, Shopify, GoDaddy, WooCommerce, Square, PayPal, Adyen and Authorize.net — what each really costs to take a card online, why the headline percentage is the wrong thing to shop on, and how owning your own checkout changes the maths.
🇺🇸 US edition. Selling from elsewhere? Read the UK, Australia or India version.
Payment processing is one of the few costs every online store pays on every single sale. For a small shop the gap between providers is a few dollars a month; at $100,000, $1 million or $10 million a year, small differences in the rate turn into real money. The catch is that you cannot shop on the percentage alone — some of these companies sell payment infrastructure, others sell an entire store with payments baked in. Here is how the major US options compare in 2026, and how to think about the number that actually matters: total cost of running and converting a sale.
These are standard published US online-card rates. They vary by plan, card type, volume and payment method, so always check the provider's current pricing before you commit — but as a starting point:
| Provider | Typical US online rate | Best known for |
|---|---|---|
| GoDaddy Payments | 2.7% + $0.30 | Integrated commerce at a low rate |
| Stripe | 2.9% + $0.30 | Developer payment infrastructure |
| Shopify Payments | 2.9% → 2.5% + $0.30 | All-in-one store platform |
| WooPayments | 2.9% + $0.30 | WordPress / WooCommerce |
| Square | 2.9% + $0.30* | Online + physical retail |
| PayPal | Varies by method | Consumer wallet & recognition |
| Adyen | Fixed fee + method fee | Enterprise / global commerce |
| Authorize.net | 2.9% + $0.30 + gateway | Traditional payment gateway |
* Square's 2.9% + $0.30 online rate applies on a paid Square plan; its free plan is higher (see below). Shopify's rate falls with the plan tier.
Looking only at the percentage is misleading, because almost every provider adds a fixed per-transaction fee on top. Take a straightforward $100 domestic card purchase:
The fixed 30¢ matters far more on small baskets. On a $20 sale it is 1.5% of the order on its own; on a $1,000 sale it is 0.03%. So a store selling $15 phone cases has a very different effective rate from one selling $900 sofas, even on identical published pricing. Scale it up and the percentage starts to dominate: at $100,000 a month across 1,000 orders of $100, GoDaddy's 2.7% works out around $3,000 a month against Stripe's roughly $3,200 — a $200 gap, $2,400 a year. Real, but rarely the deciding factor once everything else is counted.
Stripe is the benchmark for developer-focused payments. Standard US pricing is 2.9% + $0.30 per successful domestic card charge, plus 1.5% for international cards and a further 1% when currency conversion is needed — so a cross-border sale in a foreign currency can reach 5.4% + $0.30. Its appeal was never the headline rate; it is the breadth around the payment: Checkout, Payment Links, Billing, Subscriptions, Connect, Invoicing, Tax, Radar fraud tools, and APIs that cover 100+ payment methods across 195 countries. For anyone building a custom checkout, a marketplace, a SaaS product or a headless storefront, that programmability is the product. There is no monthly fee for standard processing; you pay for extra Stripe products only if you use them.
Shopify is an ecommerce platform first, with payments built in — hosting, catalogue, checkout, inventory, themes, apps and POS in one subscription. Processing drops as you move up the plans: Basic 2.9% + $0.30, Grow 2.7% + $0.30, Advanced 2.5% + $0.30, and Shopify Plus negotiated from around 2.25% + $0.30.
Those plans cost $39, $105 and $399 a month respectively on monthly billing (about $29, $79 and $299 if you pay annually). And there is a sting worth knowing: if you use any processor other than Shopify Payments, Shopify adds its own transaction fee on top — 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, 0.2% on Plus. That penalty is what keeps most Shopify merchants on Shopify Payments, and it is exactly the kind of platform lock-in a self-owned checkout avoids.
The quiet surprise. GoDaddy's published online-store rate is 2.7% + $0.30 — below Stripe's and Shopify Basic's standard 2.9%. The 0.2-point gap is small per sale but compounds with volume, and GoDaddy's expanding Commerce APIs mean it is no longer only the old "GoDaddy site → GoDaddy checkout" box: developers can increasingly put a custom front end in front of GoDaddy's commerce infrastructure. For small and mid-sized US merchants, existing GoDaddy customers, or anyone wanting an integrated stack at a competitive rate, it deserves more attention than it usually gets. The trade-off versus Stripe is the maturity and breadth of the developer ecosystem around it.
Square is strongest where online meets a physical till. Its online and API rate is 2.9% + $0.30 — but note Square overhauled pricing in late 2025, and that rate now applies on a paid plan (Plus at $49/month or Premium at $149/month); the free plan's online rate rose to 3.3% + $0.30. For a business running a shop, pop-ups and a website from one system, that unified inventory-and-payments story can be worth more than shaving a few basis points online.
WooPayments turns WordPress + WooCommerce into a store, at 2.9% + $0.30 for US cards with no monthly fee — maximum control of the site and code, in exchange for owning more of the stack yourself. PayPal is less a rate to compare than a conversion decision: its rates vary by product, but millions of shoppers already trust its wallet, so many stores run it alongside Stripe rather than instead of it. Adyen prices as a fixed processing fee plus a per-method fee and is built for enterprise scale, multiple currencies and complex routing — investigate negotiated pricing there, not the published rate. Authorize.net remains a traditional gateway: around 2.9% + $0.30 plus a ~$25/month gateway fee, suited to businesses with an existing merchant-account relationship.
The pattern: the market splits into payment infrastructure you build on (Stripe, and increasingly GoDaddy's and WooCommerce's APIs) and platforms that bundle the store around the payment (Shopify, Square). Neither is better — they answer different questions.
This is where a bare percentage comparison falls apart. Alongside the processing fee, a store also pays for some mix of ecommerce software, hosting, apps, fraud tools, subscription billing, tax calculation, currency conversion, chargebacks, accounting integrations, shipping and development. A Shopify merchant pays the monthly plan on top of processing; a Stripe user pays nothing monthly for basic processing but may add Billing or Tax. And for US stores selling abroad, Stripe's +1.5% international and +1% conversion — or Shopify's +1% international — routinely matter more than the gap between a 2.7% and 2.9% domestic rate. The cheapest processor is not automatically the cheapest way to run a store.
The biggest shift in ecommerce is separating the storefront from the commerce engine: instead of "Shopify site → Shopify checkout", a store runs a fast custom front end that calls a commerce API and a payment provider directly. That is the model Claude CMS builds. Your pages stay self-hosted and quick; checkout is Stripe, connected to your own Stripe account, so money lands with you and there is no platform taking a slice of every order. You pay Stripe's rate and nothing on top — none of the third-party-gateway surcharge a hosted platform would add for bringing your own processor.
It also means the keys stay yours. When you connect Stripe (or any service) to a Claude CMS store, the credential is sealed in Claude CMS Vault — encrypted on arrival, usable to run your checkout, never exposed. The connections hub lists the payment, shipping and email services a store can plug into the same way. The result is the flexibility of building on raw infrastructure with none of the usual assembly work.
There is no single winner — only the right fit:
For a US store in 2026, the headline transaction fee is only one input. Stripe is the strongest programmable infrastructure; Shopify the strongest all-in-one; WooCommerce the most flexible for WordPress; Square the best online-plus-offline story; and GoDaddy quietly competitive. The best choice is the one with the lowest total cost of running and converting your customers — and if you want the low-rate, own-your-own-Stripe economics of headless without wiring it together yourself, that is the point of building the store with Claude.
New to this? Start with our guide to setting up your Claude ecommerce website — from an empty site to a working store with Stripe connected to your own account.
On the standard published online rate, GoDaddy Payments is lowest among integrated platforms at 2.7% + $0.30, under the 2.9% + $0.30 of Stripe, Shopify Basic and Square. Shopify Advanced reaches 2.5% + $0.30, but only on a $399/month plan. The lowest percentage is rarely the lowest total cost.
$3.20 at 2.9% + $0.30; $3.00 at 2.7% + $0.30; $2.80 at Shopify Advanced's 2.5% + $0.30; and $3.60 on Square's free-plan rate of 3.3% + $0.30.
Yes — using a third-party gateway instead of Shopify Payments adds 2% (Basic), 1% (Grow), 0.6% (Advanced) or 0.2% (Plus) on top of the processor's rate. A headless store on its own Stripe account pays no such surcharge.
A processor (Stripe) is programmable payment infrastructure you build on; a platform (Shopify) bundles the whole store around payments. Their rates aren't directly comparable, because with a platform you're also buying the store.