4.7×
how far apart six providers land on the same business — cheapest 1.50%, dearest 7.12%. That is the spread once you work the cost out channel by channel, card type by card type, transaction size by transaction size, instead of reading the headline number off a price list.
August told half the story
In August I wrote that a percentage is not a price. The only number you can put side by side is the cost per hundred euros of turnover, at your own volume and your own card mix.
That was right, and it was half the job. I worked that number out for one business — an online shop, €2,000 a month, everything on the web — and left the reader a task nobody actually takes on. Nobody has a spreadsheet to type six providers' price lists into.
Now there is a tool that does it.
Three things I did not account for in August
The payment channel reorders the ranking. A terminal, a phone and a website are not the same price, and not even the same product. Two of the six providers do not do phone payments at all, two give no price for web payments, and one has no terminal. If your turnover is split across channels, you cannot compare providers on a single percentage — which is exactly what I did in August.
Hardware is once, fees are every month. A smart terminal costs a hundred and seventy euros up front; terminal rental is fifteen euros a month. Over a year the first is cheaper; in the first month it is not. The calculator puts the one-off cost into the first period in full, so what you see is the real first-season cost rather than a depreciation schedule.
A seasonal business pays twelve months of terminal. A beach house sells for three months and pays terminal rental all year, because the contract runs year-round. There is a switch for that.
What I saw in it myself
I left the defaults alone — ten thousand euros of turnover a year, split evenly between terminal, phone and web — and the six providers came out almost five times apart. The cheapest was 1.50%, the dearest 7.12%. The gap was not about who negotiates better. It came from fixed monthly costs, and from providers not covering every channel this business uses.
The percentage the calculator gives you is worked out on the share of turnover the provider actually covers, not on all of it. Otherwise a provider that does not serve one of your channels would look cheaper than it is. Coverage has its own column in the table.
Try it with your own numbers
Every default is editable. If you have a contract, type its numbers in and see where you stand among the six. It takes two minutes and does not ask for your email address.