Bypassing Shopify's transaction fees

When trying to maximise margins, I realised my checkout payment methods were probably a place where I could reduce costs.

Getting charged around 3% per payment on my already 10% margin store is just painful. When discussing this with a friend of mine in Dubai who runs Wondergifts.ae, he told me he had bypassed Shopify checkout by asking his devs to bring Apple Pay forward, follow through the details Apple gives the store, and then use an API to push in “manual checkouts”.

Anyway, I began exploring this a little bit because I was concerned I’d get banned from Shopify if I tried to replicate what their programmers did. But I found the entire thing is pretty bullshit. Shopify keeps merchants in fear of getting banned, when in reality, they don’t seem to have much enforcing it, and they don’t actually care as long as you’re paying your monthly Shopify plan fees.

As I was exploring this web of discovery, I realised there is a massive underbelly of merchants in countries like Norway using open banking systems directly at the cart page, with QR code scans to take payments. Again, bypassing Shopify instantly and saving on fees.

Continuing my research, I found a few providers offering similar services. One of them was Zahlo.eu, which pretty much promised to skip Shopify fees and charge 1% on transactions. All that was needed was to install the SDK, and within a month, 50% of my customers began using this open banking system, which is apparently already big everywhere in Europe except the UK (Fuck Brexit).

At first, I must say it was a bit annoying because getting customers to switch over was hard. But once Zahlo started offering the 1% cut of the transaction back to the customer at checkout, they seemed to transition over pretty quickly. The other half is still stuck with Apple Pay and whatnot, which I will also be taking out of Shopify checkout.

I feel like, for too long, merchants have been stuck in the fold of tech giants like Shopify and unable to escape that matrix. But with just a bit of time and not much effort, getting out of the box isn’t actually that hard.

All that to say:

• Screw Shopify. JK, love you.
• I’m now happily up to 12.5% margins, with an extra £60k a year back in my pocket.
• If you’re really interested in raising margins, check out open banking options (shoutout Zahlo :)