What is the best Shopify Payments alternative for a DTC brand?

Two different questions hide behind "Shopify Payments alternative"

Some brands mean: which other processor can I plug into Shopify? Others mean: how do I stop depending on Shopify Payments at all? The answers are different, because Shopify prices the first one.

When a Shopify store takes cards through any provider other than Shopify Payments, Shopify's own help center says the store pays "both a transaction fee from Shopify, and credit card fees charged by their third-party payment provider." That extra fee is 2% (Basic), 1% (Grow), 0.6% (Advanced) or 0.2% (Plus). A processor with a lower headline rate than Shopify Payments still usually ends up costing more on Shopify, because of that fee.

What one month costs: $50,000 in 1,000 orders

The same month on every option: $50,000 of card sales in 1,000 orders, plans paid monthly, domestic cards. "Another processor" is priced at Stripe's published 2.9% + 30¢, a common headline rate: read it as any processor at that rate. PlatformDTC Payments also counts its payouts, passed on at cost (0.25% + $0.25 per payout and the account fee), for a store paid out every day.

Read it plainly. Shopify Grow with Shopify Payments ($1,755) costs less than PlatformDTC Payments at this volume, and so does Basic with Shopify Payments ($1,789), though by less. The gap opens the moment a Shopify store uses another processor: the cheapest of those is $2,355. On PlatformDTC, your own Stripe account costs only Stripe's rate, $1,750, with no plan and no platform fee. Put your own numbers into the fee calculator at /tools/fee-calculator.

The options, ranked for a DTC brand that wants off Shopify Payments

Ranked on four things a DTC brand lives with every month: what each sale really costs, whether saved cards can leave with you, what happens when a card is declined, and whether subscriptions run in the same system as the orders.

Saved cards: the cost that decides it for subscription brands

For a subscription brand, the biggest cost of leaving a processor is not a rate. It is every subscriber who has to type their card in again, and the share of them who never do.

Shopify publishes a way to bring saved cards into Shopify: moving full card numbers needs the Plus or Enterprise plan. It publishes no way to send saved cards out of Shopify Payments to another processor. The only statement we found is a 2022 Shopify staff reply on its Community forum: "there is currently no possible way of exporting that data to a new gateway."

Stripe publishes the opposite: it will work with your new processor to transfer your card data securely, to a receiver that is PCI DSS Level 1. So if card portability matters to you, keep the cards in an account you own. On PlatformDTC you can connect your own Stripe account, and the cards your customers save sit in that account.

Where PlatformDTC fits, stated plainly

PlatformDTC is the whole store: storefront, checkout, subscriptions, orders and fulfilment in one system. Cards can be charged through PlatformDTC Payments (2.9% + $0.30, no plan fee), your own Stripe account, PayPal (the PayPal button, or PayPal processing the cards typed into your checkout) or Authorize.Net. Only one card processor is active at a time, and switching is a setting: existing subscriptions keep renewing on the processor that first charged them.

When PlatformDTC Payments or your own Stripe account declines a card, smart retry offers the shopper your backup processor (PayPal card processing) in the same checkout. It never retries a fraud block or a card the bank says not to retry, and leaves 1 in 10 eligible declines alone so the saving can be measured.

It is not the right move if Shopify Payments works for you on Grow or higher and you have no subscriptions: the table above shows Shopify can cost less, and a migration has costs of its own. NMI, Checkout.com, MyFatoorah and Airwallex accounts can be linked on PlatformDTC today, but checkout does not take card payments through them yet.