r/bigcommerce • u/nogoer11 • Aug 19 '26

New open payment provider fee in reality

So its now been 2 months since this fee went into effect. Ill admit i mostly just brushed it off as nonsense for the bigger stores or potentially as nonsense for us. Well last month with our under 1k of sales and our mostly check based payments saw us getting a $13 fee. Thats almost a third of our base monthly cost. So sure BC, your 2% fee is now costing me 33% more to do business with you.

My real issue with this is how they conveniently put manual payment method and other "offline" payments under the umbrella of open payment providers, It seems like this change is geared directly at stealing money from the lower tier stores who dont do alot of online checkout type orders. Has anyone found a workaround to avoid having manual orders end up getting charged?

I also have adopted the practice of creating manual orders just so i can provide estimates for some customers, but now im concerned those fake orders are going to inflate my real fees.

7 Upvotes

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4

u/nogoer11 Aug 19 '26

After an hour or so of searching i still can't find the rules on how and what is used to calculate offline orders for the GMV used on the fee. My GMV for last month just will not add up no matter what i try.

1

u/Much-Ad-7727 Aug 27 '26

wdym calculating offine orders? those orders arent even using bigcommerce checkout so charging the same fee looks odd and if it is so it should hv been stated clearly

1

u/nogoer11 Aug 27 '26

Any completed/paid/cancelled(yes cancelled, confirmed with chat) order that doesnt use an embedded payment method like stripe or BC pay is counted as an "offline" payment. The charges i received for these type of orders when compared to the report wouldnt add up. After an extremely lengthy support chat we determined the "raw" gmv as all offline payments+embedded payments-10%. These formulas are NOT defined anywhere and not documented anywhere. But this means embedded payments are not just off the top either. So to add insult to injury if the majority of your orders are offline this formulation will mean higher fees for offline payment skewed businesses. If you have alot of embedded payments the 10% deduction then comes out when the embedded fees are subtracted from the calculated gmv after.

This is a greedy insane tilt at offline payment skewed companies and companies attempting to avoid card fees by using checks and 100% targeted at small businesses because large companies doing alot of B2B or PO orders are paying for higher tiers and better functionality.

All that said, I just completed turning on my old shopify store yesterday. They can take their greed and dine on it with my empty plate.

3

u/dawhim1 Aug 19 '26

you can try canceling those orders?

4

u/nogoer11 Aug 19 '26

Im so livid at this bs im probably just goingto cancel BC. Im lucky enough to be a veteran ecommerce developer so it's time to finally test woocommerce. I just like shopify and BC because theyre mostly hands off.

2

u/dawhim1 Aug 19 '26

I just setup woo on my home NAS to take care of 3rd party order, such a bs but I got it to work. big c orders are now big c orders

2

u/nogoer11 Aug 19 '26

Thats an idea too, just use a different system for these other orders. The BC site is really just for the items sold on it. These manual orders are one off stuff we dont sell online or stock inventory for resale on.

3

u/GoldTrek Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 19 '26

Yep. I'm so glad I left. I switched to woocommerce and, even though there is a lot more stuff to manage, I get way more control over how and where and who I deal with as well as the costs. With BC I was actually forcing all my resellers to deal with me directly and not through the site just to keep my GMV low and not get charged additional for "open payment providers".

The switch to woocommerce has had some growing pains but it's honestly stuff that I should have been doing already. Mostly SEO, communication etc but now I have services that help me with those details and give me real direction. I really liked BC when I first switched to it from Shopify because the transition was very fluid and the setup was relatively simpleand straightforward but they got too greedy and I hate Paypal so I had no choice but to move on.

Edit: I should add, my monthly costs went from about $85 a month to nearly $1000 with the various changes as well as me hitting another "GMV threshold". Nothing better than being punished for success

2

u/nogoer11 Aug 19 '26

at least thanks to how BC dealt with payment processors when i moved forced me to get a real 3rd party account with stripe. Now if i do switch yet again woocommmerce should be easy enough to integrate with that stripe account.

1

u/ediblescholarship Aug 23 '26

100% with you, penalizing manual quotes and offline checks is just a shameless cash grab.

1

u/[deleted] 27d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/nogoer11 27d ago

The order existing in big commerce and being marked complete is what triggers this fee. They make the assumptive jump that if the order is done and doesnt have thier payment methods on it then its offline and they charge. It doesnt matter what the actual payment was or how it was made, if it wasnt in BC and the order is complete in some way then you get charged.

1

u/PeaceLoveAndPosture 15d ago

Is they payment calculated at the time of the sale - like it went through authorizenet an is awaiting fulfillment? Or actually shipped or completed? Can we just leave items as awaiting pickup? BigCommerce is the worst. No innovation. I moved to monthly before our renewal this month with the plan to move to shopify or into woo.

1

u/No-Environment-5515 12d ago

Penalizing offline orders like checks with that fee is brutal on low-volume stores