Accepting iDEAL, and migrating to Wero

The scheme itself sets out the structure. Fees differ per iDEAL and Wero partner, the most common arrangement is a fixed fee per transaction, and some partners offer a monthly subscription instead. That one structural fact decides where iDEAL sits in your cost stack, and it behaves the opposite way to a card rate.

At 25 cents a transaction, a 25 euro basket carries the equivalent of 1 per cent and a 200 euro basket carries 0.125 per cent. A card percentage moves the other way, taking more as the basket grows. Somewhere between the two sits a basket value where the cheaper method changes, and finding yours is one division: your iDEAL fee divided by your effective card rate. At 25 cents against an effective 1.2 per cent, the crossover sits just under 21 euros.

That number is what turns steering from habit into arithmetic. It is also worth remembering that the fee is negotiated, not fixed by the scheme: on a million iDEAL transactions a year, 5 cents of difference per transaction is 50,000 euros of EBITDA, argued in the same conversation as your card rates rather than accepted as a cost of selling in the Netherlands.

An iDEAL payment is a SEPA credit transfer the customer initiates from their own bank account, and the scheme gives the payee an immediate online payment guarantee, which is what allows goods and services to be released straight away. That is a different legal position from anything on a card rail.

Article 80 of PSD2 is why. A payment service user may not revoke a payment order once it has been received by the payer’s payment service provider. The customer authorised the payment and instructed their own bank, so there is nothing to revoke and no issuer for them to instruct instead.

The refund right in Article 76 does not reach it either. That right covers transactions initiated by or through the payee where the exact amount was not fixed in the authorisation, and neither condition holds here: the payer initiates, for an amount they saw. Anything you send back, you send back because you decided to, as a separate outbound payment. The post-settlement exposure a card or a direct debit carries is simply absent, and in a business with a high dispute rate that is worth real money.

The transition runs in phases. From early 2026 the iDEAL logo at checkout began to be replaced by the combined iDEAL | Wero mark, which is where EPI dates the start of the transition. By October 2026 all Dutch issuing banks are connected to Wero, and from that point iDEAL payments move gradually onto the Wero infrastructure. When that reaches you, and in what form, is set by your provider rather than by the scheme. The migration is to be complete by 31 December 2027. Wero has been live for consumer payments in Belgium, France and Germany since 2024 with 56 million users, and live for retail payments in Germany since the end of 2025, with France and Belgium following through 2026.

CCV, Online Payment Platform, Buckaroo and Mollie all document iDEAL, as does every PSP serving the Dutch market, which makes it the wrong first question. The better one is what each charges per iDEAL transaction, on what basis, and what they intend to do at the Wero cutover. Two Dutch merchants with comparable volume can pay materially different amounts for identical transactions, and neither finds out until the line is isolated and benchmarked against the market.