What taking your first payment online actually costs

A €20 sale does not leave you €20. In the Netherlands, VAT takes €3.47 and a standard European card takes €0.55, so about €15.98 reaches you. The number that catches people out is not the card rate — it is that the rate is charged on the VAT too, and that one chargeback costs more than two sales earn.

Everything below comes from Stripe's Netherlands pricing page, checked on 2 October 2026, and from the shop on this site, which runs on exactly this setup. Check the page again before you quote it anywhere; payment pricing changes more often than anyone announces.

What does the processor actually take?

Not one number. Five, depending on which card is in front of your customer.

The spread between the cheapest and the most expensive row is more than double, and you do not get to choose which one someone pays with.

A premium card is a business, corporate or rewards card. If you sell to other companies rather than to consumers, assume the second row rather than the first when you plan — otherwise your first quarter will look worse than your spreadsheet promised, and you will spend a day hunting for a mistake that is not there.

The €0.25 is the part that decides whether a cheap product is worth selling at all. On a €20 sale it is 1.25% of the price. On a €3 sale it is 8.3%. This is the real reason almost nobody sells a €3 digital product one at a time: the fixed fee eats the category. Bundle it, or price it where the fixed fee disappears into the noise.

Why is the fee charged on the VAT?

Because the processor takes a percentage of what it moves, and what it moves is the whole amount your customer paid.

In the EU your advertised price is VAT-inclusive. €20 means €20 at the till, with the tax already inside it. So a sale splits like this:

The VAT was never yours — it is collected and passed on. But the card fee is calculated on €20 rather than on the €16.53 you keep, so you pay about five cents of fee on tax you never see. It is a small amount and it is not worth being annoyed about.

It is worth understanding, because it makes "I charge €20" and "I earn €20" two different sentences. Every pricing decision you make from here sits on the second one.

How much does the customer's country change this?

More than the headline rate suggests, and in a direction most people get backwards.

A spread of 73 cents, or about 4.5% of your margin, decided entirely by who happens to buy. That is not a problem to solve — it is a reason not to build a business model that only works at the top row.

If your product is priced so tightly that an international sale stops being worth making, the price is wrong, not the payment provider.

What does one chargeback cost?

€20 per dispute, on the same pricing page. That is the fee alone, separate from the money you give back.

So a disputed €20 sale costs you the €20 refund plus €20 in fees, against a margin of €15.98.

One chargeback erases that sale, the next one, and most of the one after that. At your current volume — which, if you are reading this before your first sale, is zero — that is the only line item on this page big enough to actually hurt you.

Here is the useful part: most disputes on digital products are not fraud. They are someone who paid and never received the file, or someone who received it and did not recognise the name on their bank statement three weeks later. Both are preventable, and neither is prevented by choosing a different provider.

What happens to the fee when you refund?

You do not get it back.

Stripe's support documentation is explicit: for all refunds, the payment processing and currency conversion fees from the original charge are not returned. The reasoning is that the card networks already took their share and that money is gone.

Fifty-five cents. That is the whole cost of being generous about refunds, and it is worth saying out loud because people assume it is much worse and write restrictive policies to avoid it.

Compare it to the €20 a dispute costs. A customer who asks you for a refund and gets one costs you €0.55. The same customer, told no, who goes to their bank instead costs you €20 plus the refund anyway. A no-questions refund policy is not generosity — at these numbers it is the cheaper of the two options by a factor of thirty-six.

Is there a way to not do the VAT yourself?

Yes, and it is most of what a platform's percentage actually buys.

Some sellers — the larger digital-product platforms among them — act as the seller of record. Legally the customer buys from them, not from you, which means the VAT registration, the rate for the buyer's country, and the filing are all theirs. You receive a payout and a statement.

That is a genuine service and it is the single best argument for paying a percentage, especially in your first year when cross-border VAT is unfamiliar and the amounts are small enough that getting it wrong is embarrassing rather than expensive.

What you give up is the customer. Not the sale — the relationship: the email address, the ability to tell someone you have revised the thing they bought, the ability to offer them the next one. Whether that trade is worth it depends on whether you intend to sell these people a second thing.

At one product and ten sales a month, let someone else do the paperwork. At a catalogue and a mailing list, the percentage starts to look like rent.

What should you do before the first sale?

Two things, and they take an hour between them.

Set a statement descriptor the buyer will recognise. Not your company's legal name, not an abbreviation you invented. The name of the thing they bought, or the site they bought it from. This single setting prevents more disputes than anything else you can do.

Deliver instantly, automatically. Not "I will email the file when I see the notification." The gap between paying and receiving is where doubt lives, and doubt is what a dispute is made of. If you are building this yourself, how to sell a digital product without a platform walks through the delivery side.

What should you not bother with yet?

Comparing providers.

At ten sales a month, the entire difference between the mainstream options is a couple of euros. An evening spent comparing them costs more than it saves, and the two biggest components — the fixed €0.25 and the VAT — are the same wherever you go.

What is worth looking at once you are actually selling is your own transaction list rather than anyone's pricing page: specifically, how often you are being charged the premium-card rate. If it is most of the time, your customers are businesses, and that changes what you should be selling them more than it changes which processor you want.

And if the fees are what is making you hesitate about running your own checkout at all, that is the wrong reason. The fees are nearly identical everywhere. The question is who does the VAT paperwork and who owns the customer, which is a different article: how to sell a digital product without a platform covers what you take on when you leave a platform behind.

Where these numbers came from

Stripe's Netherlands pricing page, checked 2 October 2026. The Dutch standard VAT rate of 21%. The €20 example is the price of the playbooks on this site, so this is the arithmetic I actually run rather than an illustration.

Prices on this page will go stale. The structure will not: a percentage, a fixed amount per transaction, a surcharge for distance, and a dispute fee that dwarfs all three.

If you are working out what to charge rather than what it costs you, The Digital Products Playbook goes through pricing from the other end.