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Category fit and hands-on review
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Best European Alternatives to Shopify
Privacy-focused e-commerce platforms for European businesses.
Key takeaways
- Shopify is Canadian, not American, and Canada holds an EU adequacy decision for commercial organisations that the Commission reviewed in January 2024 and has not withdrawn.
- Shopify adds 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus to every order paid through a provider other than Shopify Payments.
- Shopify Payments is available in thirty-one European countries and territories, so the claim that European merchants cannot use it is simply wrong.
- None of the four providers on this page replaces the Shopify storefront; they replace the checkout behind it, which is a far smaller change.
- The surcharge is steepest on the cheapest plan, so the merchants with the least volume pay the highest penalty for choosing their own processor.
Why people leave Shopify
Shopify is one of the few incumbents on this site where the usual argument collapses on inspection.
Shopify Inc. is a Canadian company in Ottawa, merchants in Europe, the Middle East and Africa contract with Shopify International Limited in Ireland, and Canada (commercial organisations) has held an adequacy decision from the European Commission, listed by the Commission as its 2002 decision and still on the register today, with the report on its first review published on 15 January 2024.
The US CLOUD Act does not reach a Canadian corporation. If someone has told you your store data is exposed to American disclosure orders because you are on Shopify, they have not checked.
What is true is narrower and costs real money. Shopify charges you for not using its own payment processing: 2% of every order on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus, added on top of whatever your chosen provider already charges. That fee exists for one reason, which is to make Shopify Payments the path of least resistance.
So this page is not about moving your shop. Every tool ranked below is a payment provider, not a storefront, and none of them will host your products, your themes or your checkout. What they replace is the part of Shopify that touches your customers’ money, and the question they answer is whether the surcharge is worth paying to get there.
- The jurisdiction argument does not apply Shopify Inc. is incorporated in Canada and the European contracting entity is registered in Dublin. Canada’s adequacy decision covers organisations acting in the course of commercial activities under PIPEDA, which is exactly what a merchant platform does, and the Commission published the first review of that decision on 15 January 2024 without withdrawing it. Anyone selling you a European shop platform on CLOUD Act grounds is describing a risk you do not have.
- A percentage for using your own provider The surcharge is the real complaint. At Basic, €21 a month, you hand over 2% of every order to Shopify before your processor takes its own cut, which for a European merchant paying €0.32 on an iDEAL payment turns a fixed fee into a percentage again. The surcharge falls as the plan gets more expensive — 1% at €59, 0.6% at €289 — so the arithmetic is really a choice between a higher subscription and a lower transaction penalty.
- Shopify Payments is card-shaped Shopify’s own rates are quoted per card transaction: 1.9% + €0.25 on Basic, 1.8% on Grow, 1.6% on Advanced. That is a perfectly reasonable card rate and it is the wrong unit for half of European e-commerce, where a Dutch customer pays by iDEAL, a Belgian by Bancontact and a German by direct debit or on invoice. A percentage of the basket is a bad deal on a €200 order that a bank transfer settles for cents.
- The lock-in is the storefront, not the money Themes written in Liquid, the app catalogue, the URL structure and years of customer accounts are what make leaving Shopify hard. The payment provider is the one component you can change on a Tuesday afternoon without touching any of it. That is why this page treats the checkout separately: it is the part of the decision you can act on without a replatforming project.
What you have to replace, not just match
Decide which of the three things Shopify sells you are actually unhappy with, because they detach from each other cleanly and only one of them is addressed here.
The first is the storefront: hosting, themes, product catalogue, the admin your staff use. Nothing on this page replaces that, and any list that pretends a payment provider is a Shopify alternative is padding. The second is the checkout and the money behind it — acquiring, payment methods, payouts, chargebacks. That is what the four providers below do. The third is retail: Shopify POS, the card reader on the counter and the stock that has to match the website.
If your objection is the 2% surcharge, you are replacing the second thing and keeping the first. If your objection is that Shopify’s in-person rates and hardware do not suit a market stall or a single till, the fourth provider on this page is the one to read and the storefront question does not arise at all.
The alternatives compared
| Position | Tool | Headquarters | Pricing | Jurisdiction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | Mollie | Amsterdam, Netherlands | Per method, from €0.29 (iDEAL); cards from €0.29 + 1.8% | EU (Netherlands) |
| #2 | Adyen | Amsterdam, Netherlands | Interchange-plus; about €0.11 + scheme fee per transaction | EU (Netherlands) |
| #3 | Klarna | Stockholm, Sweden | About 2.5%–5.99% + a fixed fee, by market and product | EU (Sweden) |
| #4 | SumUp | Berlin, Germany | From 1.69% per transaction | EU (Germany) |
How each alternative compares to Shopify
- Which law reaches it. EU (Netherlands). Shopify is operated from Canada, outside the EU and without an adequacy decision, so transfers rest on contractual safeguards rather than on the data staying inside the EEA.
- Where the data sits. EU data centres.
- Source code. Closed source, as Shopify is.
- Independently checked. PCI DSS, PSD2/SCA.
Best for: Shopify merchants selling into Dutch, Belgian and German markets
Mollie B.V. is based in Amsterdam and publishes its own Shopify app, so the change is an install and a key rather than a project. Cards sit in an embedded field on your store, and next to them go the methods Shopify Payments does not always settle locally: iDEAL, Wero, Bancontact and Klarna among them.
The pricing shape is the argument. Mollie charges per method rather than a single blended card percentage: €0.32 on an iDEAL payment, 1.8% + €0.25 on a European consumer card, with no monthly fee on the pay-as-you-go plan. Against Shopify Payments at 1.9% + €0.25 on Basic that is close on cards and structurally different on bank transfers, because a fixed fee does not grow with the basket.
Then add Shopify’s surcharge, and be honest about what it does to this comparison. On Basic, 2% on top of Mollie’s fee makes cards more expensive than staying put; on Advanced at 0.6% or Plus at 0.2% the case is straightforward. Mollie is the right answer for a merchant whose volume sits on the higher plans or whose customers mostly do not pay by card.
What Mollie does better than Shopify
- Local European methods priced individually, where Shopify Payments quotes one card percentage
- A flat €0.32 on an iDEAL payment, a fixed fee that does not scale with the order value
- Dutch company supervised by De Nederlandsche Bank, so the money as well as the data stays in the EU
- No monthly fee of its own, so the cost is transaction-only on top of the Shopify plan
- Self-serve onboarding, where Shopify’s larger alternatives need a salesperson
Where Mollie is a step down from Shopify
- Shopify adds 2% on Basic and 1% on Grow to every Mollie transaction, which usually wipes out the saving on cards
- Payouts, refunds and disputes leave the Shopify admin and live in a second dashboard
- Coverage outside Europe is thinner than what Shopify Payments settles globally
- Any external gateway adds a step to a checkout Shopify has tuned itself
Standout against Shopify. It is the only provider here with an official Shopify app and per-method pricing, so a merchant can work out the cost of a Dutch or Belgian checkout before installing anything.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Netherlands). Shopify is operated from Canada, outside the EU and without an adequacy decision, so transfers rest on contractual safeguards rather than on the data staying inside the EEA.
- Where the data sits. EU data centres.
- Source code. Closed source, as Shopify is.
- Independently checked. PCI DSS Level 1.
Best for: Merchants with real volume, several countries and shops as well as a website
Adyen N.V. is in Amsterdam, listed on Euronext, and holds a Dutch banking licence, which means it holds merchant funds itself rather than parking them with a partner bank. For a Shopify merchant that is a balance-sheet argument rather than a checkout one, and it only starts to matter at the volumes where a treasury team exists.
The reason it belongs on a Shopify page is the surcharge table. At Plus, Shopify’s penalty for an external provider falls to 0.2%, which is small enough that interchange-plus pricing — roughly €0.11 plus the scheme fee — can beat Shopify Payments outright. Below Plus, the 1% or 2% on top generally eats the difference.
The second reason is the counter. Adyen designs its own terminals for countertop, mobile, unattended and tap-to-pay use and runs them on the same platform as the website, so a customer who buys online and returns in store produces one record. Shopify POS does this too, inside Shopify; Adyen does it for a business whose shops are not all on Shopify.
What Adyen does better than Shopify
- Interchange-plus at roughly €0.11 plus the scheme fee, which beats a blended card rate once volume is high
- A full Dutch banking licence, so merchant funds sit in segregated accounts rather than with a partner bank
- Its own terminal hardware for shops, kiosks and mobile, on the same platform as the online checkout
- Local payment methods on its own acquiring licences, well beyond what Shopify Payments settles
- One reconciliation across channels, including shops that are not running Shopify POS
Where Adyen is a step down from Shopify
- No self-serve signup: onboarding is a sales process, unlike turning Shopify Payments on
- Below the Plus plan, Shopify’s 0.6% to 2% surcharge usually cancels the pricing advantage
- Interchange-plus is harder to forecast than the flat percentage Shopify quotes
- Considerably more platform than a store on a €21 plan has any use for
Standout against Shopify. It is the only option here whose pricing model can beat Shopify Payments outright, and it only does so on the plan where Shopify’s surcharge has fallen to 0.2%.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Sweden). Shopify is operated from Canada, outside the EU and without an adequacy decision, so transfers rest on contractual safeguards rather than on the data staying inside the EEA.
- Where the data sits. EU.
- Source code. Closed source, as Shopify is.
- Independently checked. Swedish banking licence.
Best for: Stores where the objection is average order value, not payment costs
Klarna Bank AB operates from Stockholm under a Swedish banking licence, and it is not a cheaper way to take a Shopify order. Its merchant pricing, roughly 2.5% to 5.99% plus a fixed fee depending on market and product, is above every card rate on this page, including Shopify’s own.
What it sells is a larger basket. Pay in three or four instalments, or thirty days to pay, moves the decision for a customer looking at a €180 order, and Klarna pays the merchant whether or not the consumer eventually pays Klarna. For fashion, furniture and mid-range retail that trade is often worth it; for a €15 impulse purchase it never is.
Two things to check before adding it to a Shopify store. Whether the route you use settles through Shopify Payments or as a separate provider, because the answer decides whether the plan surcharge applies. And whether the uplift is real: measure it against a control period rather than against the sales figure you hoped for.
What Klarna does better than Shopify
- Raises average order value and completion on mid-range retail in a way no rate change can
- Klarna carries the credit and fraud risk and settles to the merchant either way
- Swedish banking licence and EU supervision, where Shopify Payments is a processing relationship
- Its consumer shopping app puts the store in front of people who started inside Klarna
Where Klarna is a step down from Shopify
- Far more expensive per transaction than Shopify Payments at 1.9% + €0.25
- Adds a method rather than replacing the checkout, so Shopify Payments usually stays alongside it
- Merchant rates are negotiated by market and product rather than published
- The uplift has to be measured, and most stores that add it never run the comparison
Standout against Shopify. It is the only provider here bought for revenue rather than for cost, which makes it the one option where a higher fee can still be the right decision.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany). Shopify is operated from Canada, outside the EU and without an adequacy decision, so transfers rest on contractual safeguards rather than on the data staying inside the EEA.
- Where the data sits. EU.
- Source code. Closed source, as Shopify is.
- Independently checked. GDPR, PCI DSS.
Best for: Traders and small shops whose card payments happen at a counter
SumUp is based in Berlin and sells a card reader for about €39 with no subscription, no contract and no minimum volume, taking a flat 1.69% on in-person transactions. There is nothing to cancel and nothing that renews.
Against Shopify that is a different shape of cost rather than a better rate. Shopify’s in-person rate of 1.4% on Basic is lower than 1.69%, but it comes with €21 a month and an online store attached. A market trader doing €3,000 a month in card payments pays about €51 with SumUp and about €63 with Shopify once the subscription is counted, and the gap widens as volume falls.
It is ranked last here for a reason that has nothing to do with quality. If your Shopify problem is the online checkout, SumUp is the wrong tool: its online rates are higher than the specialists above it and it offers nothing resembling a storefront. It answers the retail half of the question and only that half.
What SumUp does better than Shopify
- A one-off reader from about €39 with no monthly subscription, where Shopify POS requires a plan
- Flat 1.69% in person, with no contract, no minimum and no notice period
- German company with European supervision, and card processing inside European frameworks
- Live the same day, without configuring an online store you may not want
Where SumUp is a step down from Shopify
- A higher in-person percentage than Shopify’s 1.4% on Basic or 1.1% on Advanced
- No storefront, no product catalogue and no themes, so it replaces nothing online
- Past roughly €10,000 a month the single percentage stops being a bargain, and there is no volume tier
- Multi-location stock and reporting are far thinner than Shopify POS
Standout against Shopify. It is the only option on this page where the entire cost of starting is a €39 piece of hardware, which is the case a Shopify subscription answers badly.
What actually breaks when you switch
Do the surcharge arithmetic before anything else, because it decides most of these cases on its own. Your provider’s rate plus 2% on Basic or 1% on Grow is the real number, and on card-heavy volume it will usually be higher than Shopify Payments. Merchants who skip this step discover it in the first month’s statement.
Then watch the checkout itself. Swapping the gateway introduces a step Shopify did not design, and completed orders are the metric that matters rather than page speed or appearance. Run it on part of your traffic, compare like for like, and accept that a small drop in completions can outweigh a large saving in fees.
The quiet cost is reconciliation. Payouts, refunds and chargebacks move out of the Shopify admin and into a second dashboard on a different settlement schedule, and somebody has to match the two every month. It is not difficult work, but it is new work, and nobody volunteers for it after the decision has been made.
Is Shopify subject to the US CLOUD Act?
No. The CLOUD Act obliges providers subject to United States jurisdiction to produce data in their possession or control. Shopify Inc. is incorporated in Canada, and the entity that contracts with European merchants is Shopify International Limited, registered in Ireland. Neither is a US corporation.
The honest caveat is that jurisdiction is not the only route data travels. A large platform runs on infrastructure and sub-processors of its own choosing, and Canada’s adequacy decision is limited to organisations covered by PIPEDA in their commercial activities rather than being a blanket finding about the country. If your procurement process needs a documented answer, read the sub-processor list and the data processing addendum rather than the country field.
But if you were told to leave Shopify because it is an American company, that instruction was based on a factual error, and it is worth correcting before it turns into a migration budget.
Does switching payment provider on Shopify actually save money?
Only after you have done the addition, and the addition has three terms rather than two: your new provider’s rate, plus Shopify’s surcharge for the plan you are on, against the Shopify Payments rate for that same plan.
A concrete case. On Basic, Shopify Payments costs 1.9% + €0.25 per card transaction. Move to an outside provider and you pay their rate plus 2%, so even a provider charging nothing at all would leave you worse off on a card payment.
The picture reverses when the payment is not a card: a €0.32 iDEAL fee plus 2% of a €150 basket is €3.32, against €3.10 with Shopify Payments — close, and it tips further the higher the basket and the lower the plan surcharge.
The conclusion most merchants reach is uncomfortable but clear. If cards are the bulk of your volume and you are on Basic or Grow, the surcharge usually wins. The reason to leave anyway is coverage of payment methods Shopify Payments does not settle in your market, or a rate you can negotiate at volume, not a headline percentage.
What do I give up by moving the checkout off Shopify Payments?
Consolidation, mostly. With Shopify Payments, payouts, refunds and disputes appear inside the Shopify admin next to the order they belong to. With an external provider, that information lives in the provider’s dashboard and the two are reconciled by whoever does your books.
You also give up the version of checkout that Shopify tunes hardest, because it is the one it controls end to end. An external gateway adds at least a redirect or an embedded field that Shopify did not write, and every extra step in a checkout costs a measurable share of completed orders. Test it on real traffic rather than on your own phone.
What you do not give up is the store. Products, themes, apps, customers and URLs are untouched by a payment provider change, which is exactly why this is the cheapest experiment on the list.
Should a small retailer with one till be on Shopify at all?
Shopify prices in-person card payments at 1.4% on Basic and 1.1% on Advanced, which is competitive, but it arrives attached to a monthly subscription and an online store you may not want.
A stall, a market trader or a single-counter shop that sells nothing online is paying €21 a month for a website as the price of admission to a card reader. A German provider selling a reader outright for around €39 with no subscription answers that case more directly, and it is on this page for that reason.
The moment you do sell online as well, the calculation flips back, because running two providers means two sets of payouts and two reconciliations for the same business.
Which one to pick
Start by discarding the reason you were probably given. Shopify is Canadian, the European contracting entity is Irish, and Canada’s adequacy decision was reviewed by the Commission in January 2024 and is still on its register, so there is no CLOUD Act problem to solve here. If that was the whole case for moving, the case is closed.
If the reason is the surcharge, the answer depends on your plan. On Plus at 0.2%, Adyen’s interchange-plus pricing genuinely beats Shopify Payments and brings your shops onto the same platform. On Basic or Grow, the 2% or 1% penalty means an external provider has to win on payment methods rather than on price — which is exactly what Mollie does for a Dutch, Belgian or German customer base.
If the reason is that your customers hesitate at the basket rather than at the fee, Klarna is the only tool here aimed at that, and it is bought on measured uplift or not at all.
And if your Shopify subscription exists mainly to run a card reader, SumUp replaces it for the price of the hardware. That is the one case on this page where leaving Shopify altogether is the cheaper answer.
Frequently Asked Questions
The question contains a false premise worth naming: the four options ranked here are payment providers, not shop platforms, so none of them replaces Shopify itself. Mollie if you want European payment methods priced per method. Adyen if your volume justifies interchange-plus and you also have shops. Klarna if you want instalments in the basket. SumUp if the problem is a card reader on a counter rather than a checkout on a website.
No. Shopify Inc. is Canadian and based in Ottawa, and merchants in Europe, the Middle East and Africa contract with Shopify International Limited in Ireland. That matters because the CLOUD Act applies to providers under United States jurisdiction, and Canada holds an EU adequacy decision for commercial organisations that the European Commission reviewed in January 2024 and has not withdrawn. The common claim that a Shopify store is CLOUD Act exposed is wrong.
A surcharge on every order, on top of whatever the provider itself charges: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. Shopify Payments transactions are exempt from it. The practical effect is that the cheapest plan carries the highest penalty for choosing your own processor, which is worth modelling against the cost of upgrading a plan.
Yes, in thirty-one European countries and territories according to Shopify’s own list, including Germany, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Poland, the Nordics, Ireland, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. The idea that European merchants are forced onto third-party gateways is out of date, and repeating it is the fastest way to lose an argument with a finance team.
Yes. Mollie publishes a Shopify app that connects an existing Mollie account to the store and adds cards, iDEAL, Wero, Bancontact and Klarna to the checkout. Adyen serves Shopify merchants at the larger end through its own integration and a sales process. In both cases the plan surcharge applies unless you are on Plus, where it drops to 0.2%.
On annual billing, Basic is €21 a month, Grow €59, Advanced €289 and Plus starts at €2,100. Shopify Payments card rates run 1.9% + €0.25 online on Basic, 1.8% on Grow and 1.6% on Advanced, with in-person rates of 1.4%, 1.25% and 1.1% respectively. The subscription and the transaction cost have to be modelled together, because the plans trade one against the other.
In several markets, yes, and the effect is on orders rather than on fees. A Dutch checkout without iDEAL, a Belgian one without Bancontact or a Swiss one without TWINT does not convert those customers at a worse rate — it loses a share of them outright. Merchants selling across borders usually find the method list decides more revenue than the percentage ever did.
It can, and it is the risk that gets ignored. Shopify tunes its own checkout hard, and a third-party gateway introduces at least one step it did not design, whether that is a redirect or an embedded card field. Run the change on a share of traffic first and compare completed orders, because a one per cent drop in completions cancels out a two per cent saving in fees.
It works, but you pay for the platform whether or not you use the online half, starting at €21 a month. For a single counter, a market stall or a mobile trader, a reader bought outright with no subscription and a flat in-person rate is a simpler shape of cost, and that is the case SumUp is built for. Once online and in-store volume both matter, one provider covering both becomes worth more than the saving.
Who worked on this review
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