Your average order value decides your cheapest payment gateway. We ran the numbers.

Gateway fees look almost identical on the marketing pages. Run them across a year of real orders and the gap between the cheapest and the most expensive is enough to pay for a decent hosting plan, twice over.

We built the SA Payment Gateway Comparator because we kept having the same conversation with clients. Someone would say “they’re all around 3%, it doesn’t really matter”, and then we would do the arithmetic and it would turn out to matter quite a lot.

Here is what the tool does, and what it revealed when we ran realistic South African store numbers through it.

Why percentage comparison is misleading

Every gateway publishes a headline rate. Comparing those rates is how most store owners choose, and it is the wrong comparison, for four reasons.

The per-transaction rand fee dominates at low order values. A gateway charging 2.9% plus R2 is cheaper than one charging 3.5% flat — until your average order drops to R150, at which point it is not. The crossover point depends entirely on your basket size, which is why there is no universally cheapest gateway.

Rates are tiered by volume. The published rate is usually the entry rate. Most providers negotiate down as your monthly turnover rises, and the thresholds differ. The gateway that is cheapest at R50,000 a month is not necessarily the cheapest at R500,000.

Payment method changes the fee. Card, instant EFT and BNPL carry different rates from the same provider. Your effective cost is a weighted average across the mix your customers actually use, not the card rate.

Settlement delay is a real cost. Money sitting in a merchant account for several days is working capital you cannot use to buy stock. On a growing store that is not a rounding error.

What the comparator actually calculates

You put in your monthly turnover, your average order value and roughly how your payments split across card and EFT. It returns the annual cost for each major South African provider, side by side.

The point is not to tell you which gateway is best in the abstract. It is to tell you which is cheapest for your numbers, because that answer genuinely changes depending on whether you are selling R80 items or R8,000 ones.

Run your own numbers through the comparator →

What we found on a R200,000-a-month store

Take a store doing R200,000 a month at an average order value of R650. That is roughly 308 orders a month, or a bit over 3,700 a year.

Two things jumped out when we modelled it.

The spread between cheapest and most expensive was material. Not a rounding difference. On that volume, the gap across a year was enough to fund a hosting upgrade, a year of premium plugin licences and change. For a business operating on a 30% gross margin, that money comes straight off the bottom line.

The cheapest option flipped when we changed the average order value. At R650 one provider won. Drop the average to R200 — a realistic figure for a store selling consumables or small accessories — and the per-transaction fee started dominating, and a different provider came out ahead.

That is the actual finding, and it is why a static “best gateway in South Africa” list is close to useless. The right answer is a function of your basket size, and almost nobody checks.

The costs that do not appear in any comparison

Three things the fee tables never show, which matter at least as much.

• Failed payment recovery. A gateway with a clunky checkout or aggressive fraud rules will decline legitimate transactions. Every declined sale you do not recover costs you the full order value, not 3% of it. That dwarfs any fee difference.
• Integration quality. A gateway whose plugin breaks on every WooCommerce update costs you developer hours and, worse, silent order failures. We went through the diagnostics in our WooCommerce payment gateway guide.
• Support when money is missing. At some point a transaction will go wrong and a customer will be out of pocket. How fast a provider resolves that determines whether you keep the customer.

Our honest position: below roughly R50,000 a month, choose on integration quality and support rather than on fees, because the rand difference is small. Above that, the fee difference becomes real money and is worth optimising.

How to use this properly

1. Pull your actual numbers — last three months of turnover, average order value, and the split between card and EFT.
2. Run them through the comparator.
3. If the annual difference is under about R3,000, ignore it and choose on integration and support.
4. If it is more than that, it is worth a conversation with your current provider before you switch. Volume-based rate reductions are frequently available and rarely offered unprompted.
5. Only switch if the saving survives the cost of reintegrating and retesting, which is a real cost.

That last point matters. Switching gateways means reconfiguring, retesting callbacks and re-verifying that orders reconcile. Do not do it to save R800 a year.

Where to go from here

If you want the fee detail rather than the calculator, our cheapest payment gateway breakdown does the provider-by-provider maths, and our PayFast vs Ozow vs Peach vs PayGate comparison covers the feature differences.

If you want to know what you actually keep after gateway fees, COGS, VAT and shipping, that is a different and more sobering calculation — we did it on a R500 sale in what you actually keep on a R500 sale.