What 1M euro in online sales actually costs you in fees

53,000 euro. That is roughly what a store doing 1,000,000 euro a year in online sales hands over in platform and payment fees, before a single app subscription.

A standard setup on 1M euro

Shopify Basic, a 75 euro average order, an outside payment processor at 2.9% plus 0.30 euro per order. Here is where the money goes:

• Card processing (2.9%): 29,000 euro.
• Shopify per-sale surcharge (2% on Basic, because payments run through a third party): 20,000 euro.
• The 0.30 euro flat fee across about 13,300 orders: 4,000 euro.
• The plan itself: 468 euro.

The line you can delete

The surcharge line is the one that stings, and it is the one you can remove. Switch to Shopify Payments, or to a platform that charges no per-sale fee, and that 20,000 euro a year is gone. The tool shows the exact revenue where one platform overtakes another for your numbers.

The bigger line is not fixed either: processing is negotiable at this scale

The 29,000 euro card-processing line is the largest number on the page, and it is the one most people treat as a law of nature. At 1,000,000 euro of sales it is not. The blended 2.9 percent is the rate a small store is handed, not the rate a store at this volume has to accept, and there are two honest ways it comes down.

• Higher plans carry lower published rates. On Shopify Payments the online rate steps from 2.9 percent plus 0.30 euro on Basic down to 2.5 percent on the Advanced plan, and a negotiated rate reported around 2.15 percent on Plus. The catch is that the higher plan also costs more per month, so a rate cut only nets out ahead once your volume is large enough to outweigh the plan step. At 1,000,000 euro that is a calculation worth running rather than an automatic win, because on a single-digit rate move the plan fee can eat most of the saving.
• With an outside processor, the flat rate stops being the only option. For large payment volumes Stripe and other processors offer interchange-plus and custom negotiated pricing instead of a single blended percentage, which for a business at this scale can land below a flat 2.9 percent. That is a rate you ask for, not one you are given, so at 1,000,000 euro of processing it is worth a quote.

So the 29,000 euro is a starting point, not a fixed cost. The 20,000 euro surcharge is still the line you can delete outright; the processing line is the one you can shrink by moving up a plan or negotiating a rate, once your volume is big enough to have the leverage. Model both against your own numbers before you assume the 53,000 euro is the floor.

The fees the 53,000 assumes away

That 53,000 euro assumes every order sticks and every card is domestic. Three lines sit outside it, and each one only moves up.

Refunds do not give the card fee back. Whatever processor you use, when you refund an order the customer gets the full amount but the processor keeps the fee it charged, because it has to process the refund too. Shopify Payments spells this out: the original transaction fee is not refunded when you issue a refund. On the 2.9 percent plus 0.30 euro this setup pays, that is about 2.50 euro kept on every 75 euro return. At a 10 percent return rate, roughly 1,330 of these 13,300 orders, that is about 3,300 euro a year on sales that no longer exist.

Chargebacks cost more than the sale. When a customer disputes a charge, Shopify Payments deducts a flat dispute fee (15 US dollars for US merchants; the amount varies by region) along with the disputed amount, immediately, from your next payout. Win the dispute and the fee comes back in most regions; lose it or accept it and you are out the fee, the order total and usually the goods you already shipped.

International cards and currency conversion add a surcharge. Sell across borders through Shopify Payments and a foreign card adds a surcharge on top of the base rate (1.5 percent on Basic, 1 percent on the higher plans), and converting the buyer currency into your payout currency adds a conversion fee (2 percent outside the US, 1.5 percent for US stores). Neither is returned if you later refund the order.

None of these replace the 53,000 euro; they stack on top of it whenever an order is returned, disputed or paid on a foreign card. The calculator models the base load, so treat returns and cross-border traffic as the lines that push your real rate above it.

The line no fee tally shows: tax compliance

The 53,000 euro is what the platform and the processor take. It leaves out a cost that never appears on an invoice from either of them: charging, collecting and remitting sales tax or VAT. For a store selling across borders that is real work, and past a point it is a real bill.

In the EU there is one threshold of 10,000 euro of cross-border B2C sales a year. Stay under it and you charge your home VAT rate. Go over it and you must charge the rate of the country each buyer sits in, which since July 2021 you file through a single One Stop Shop (OSS) return rather than registering in all 27 member states. Goods you ship to EU buyers from outside the bloc use the Import One Stop Shop (IOSS) for consignments up to 150 euro, and the old duty relief on those low-value parcels has now ended, so the parcel itself also carries a per-item charge.

The United States has no single rule. Since the 2018 Wayfair decision each state sets its own economic nexus threshold, commonly 100,000 dollars of sales or 200 transactions into that state in a year, though many states have since dropped the transaction count. Cross a state threshold and you are meant to register, collect and file there, so a store selling nationwide can end up filing in a dozen or more states.

Doing this by hand does not scale, so most stores hand it to software, and that software is another line the 53,000 does not include. Shopify Tax, for stores created on or after 13 May 2026, is free on your first 100,000 dollars of sales a year and then charges 0.35 percent (0.25 percent on Plus) on each order in a place where you collect tax, capped at 0.99 dollars an order and 5,000 dollars a year per region, with the US, EU and UK counted separately. Standalone engines like Avalara or TaxJar are a subscription instead. Either way it is a cost the fee tally above does not carry.

There is one way to hand the whole tax question to somebody else, and it costs a percentage. A merchant of record becomes the legal seller, so it charges, collects and remits the tax in every country and takes the filing off you entirely. Paddle and Lemon Squeezy have done this for years at roughly 5 percent plus a fixed fee, and in February 2026 Stripe launched its own version, Managed Payments, at 3.5 percent per transaction on top of normal processing. The catch for this store is that these services are built for digital products and software, so a shop moving physical goods usually cannot offload VAT to one and stays on the OSS or IOSS plus a tax engine route. If what you sell is digital, the merchant-of-record fee buys you out of the filing altogether.

The fee line only now arriving: selling through AI assistants

A new place to sell is opening, and it brings a new place to be charged. Buyers are starting to complete purchases through AI assistants instead of by visiting a storefront, and two models are taking shape. In the first, the assistant surfaces your product and then sends the shopper to your own checkout to pay, so your normal platform and processing fees apply and nothing new is added. In the second, the purchase completes inside the assistant, and an intermediary can take a cut on top of the fees above.

The concrete example so far is OpenAI ChatGPT checkout. It was reported in early 2026, by The Information citing a Shopify spokesperson, to charge merchants about 4 percent on sales completed inside ChatGPT, on top of the fees Shopify already takes, while assistant checkouts from Google AI Mode and Gemini and from Microsoft Copilot were reported to carry no extra fee for now. On the 1,000,000 euro store above, a 4 percent cut is 40 euro on every 1,000 euro routed through that path, a line the base 53,000 does not include.

Treat this as a line to watch rather than a settled rate, because the mechanics kept moving through 2026. OpenAI shifted its in-chat checkout toward assistant apps, and Shopify rolled out agentic storefronts that route the shopper back to your own checkout, where your normal fees apply instead of a new cut. So the extra fee bites only when the sale actually closes inside the assistant. If AI-assistant traffic becomes a channel for you, find out which model each one uses before you assume your current fee stack already covers it.