Accepting Zip as a merchant
Zip provides buy now pay later and instalment payments, strongest in Australia and New Zealand with a presence in the United States. You are paid up front, Zip carries the credit decision and the receivable, and the fee prices that rather than transaction handling.
Published prices for ZipPer provider, country and channel, further down this pageGo to the pricesIncremental
Judge it on incremental orders, not total conversion
Some customers selecting instalments would have paid immediately by card or account transfer. That volume is revenue you already had, now at a materially higher cost. The method earns its fee only on customers who would otherwise have abandoned, and separating those two groups is the entire business case. It is measurable from checkout behaviour and it is very rarely measured.
Australia: the ground shifts on 1 October 2026
The Reserve Bank of Australia’s Conclusions Paper of 31 March 2026 removes surcharging on eftpos, Mastercard and Visa from 1 October 2026 and lowers domestic interchange caps. In its reasoning the RBA noted this allows four-party card networks to compete on a more level playing field with higher-cost payment methods that do not permit surcharging, which includes some buy now pay later products. So cards get cheaper and the ability to recover any acceptance cost from the customer disappears in the same month. For an Australian merchant that changes the relative case for instalments materially, and it changes it on a known date.
Presentation
Testing the position of the button, properly
Where the method sits in your payment selector, how prominently instalment messaging appears on product pages and whether it is preselected all move the substitution rate. That much is uncontroversial. What is usually missing is a way to find out by how much, on your own traffic, without a data team.
The test that works is a simple one. For four weeks, alternate the position of the instalment option between high and low in the selector, split by a hash of the session so the two groups are comparable, and hold everything else constant. Then compare two numbers between the groups: total completed orders, and the share of completed orders that used instalments.
The interpretation is where the value sits. If instalment share moves a lot and total orders do not, the position is moving substitution and nothing else, which means the prominent position is costing you money on revenue you already had. If total orders move as well, the position is buying incremental revenue and is earning its cost. Four weeks and one configuration switch tell you which of those is happening. Nothing in your payments report can distinguish the two, which is why the question usually stays an opinion.
Returns
A return against a running instalment schedule is three problems, not one
You are paid up front, which is the selling point, and it is also why returns behave unlike anything else in your checkout. The money has already moved, the customer still owes a schedule, and neither of those facts is visible in a returns process that was designed around cards.
Three things have to be settled and they are usually settled by nobody. Timing: how quickly a registered return stops the next instalment, because a customer who is charged after returning the goods contacts you and not the provider. Partial returns: what happens to a four-instalment schedule when one item out of three comes back, and whether the schedule shrinks or the difference is refunded separately. And the refund route: whether the customer is repaid by the provider, by you, or by a cancelled schedule, because those three look entirely different on a bank statement and produce entirely different support tickets.
Get the answers in writing, then test them once with a real order before your peak season rather than during it. The failure mode here is not a lost order. It is a customer who has your goods, has been charged again, and cannot work out who to phone.
Which payment provider supports Zip?
Fat Zebra and Zeller in Australia, alongside Adyen and Stripe, all document Zip, among others, along with the other major gateways in the relevant markets. The useful questions are the fee as a percentage of order value, the acceptance rate on your customer profile, when you are paid, how returns interact with the instalment schedule, and what your minimum order value threshold for showing instalments should be.
Retail Payment Methods Transparency Index
Published prices for Zip, per provider
One provider in the index offers Zip to merchants established in Europe, and it publishes a price.
Each rate is shown as the provider prints it; the provider's name links to its price page on this site where there is one, with the source of every rate.
The country where your business is established and from which you sell.
Includes the prices providers publish for merchants anywhere in the EU, marked EU-wide.
| Provider | Per transaction | Channel |
|---|---|---|
| Adyen Merchants anywhere in the EU | Zip Pay, United States: €0.11 + 3.50% + USD 0.30; Zip Pay, Australia: €0.11 + 3.50% + AUD 0.30; Zip Pay, New Zealand: €0.11 + 3.95% + NZD 0.30; Zip Money, Australia: €0.11 + 3.89% + AUD 0.30Processing fee + Percentage plus fixed amount | Online and in-store |
| Adyen Merchants in the United Kingdom | Zip Pay, United States: £0.11 + 3.50% + USD 0.30; Zip Pay, Australia: £0.11 + 3.50% + AUD 0.30; Zip Pay, New Zealand: £0.11 + 3.95% + NZD 0.30; Zip Money, Australia: £0.11 + 3.89% + AUD 0.30Processing fee + Percentage plus fixed amount | Online and in-store |
| Adyen Merchants in Norway | Zip Pay, United States: €0.11 + 3.50% + USD 0.30; Zip Pay, Australia: €0.11 + 3.50% + AUD 0.30; Zip Pay, New Zealand: €0.11 + 3.95% + NZD 0.30; Zip Money, Australia: €0.11 + 3.89% + AUD 0.30Processing fee + Percentage plus fixed amount | Online and in-store |
| Adyen Merchants in Poland | Zip Pay, United States: €0.11 + 3.50% + USD 0.30; Zip Pay, Australia: €0.11 + 3.50% + AUD 0.30; Zip Pay, New Zealand: €0.11 + 3.95% + NZD 0.30; Zip Money, Australia: €0.11 + 3.89% + AUD 0.30Processing fee + Percentage plus fixed amount | Online and in-store |
Source: EcomStream, Retail Payment Methods Transparency Index, ecomstream.eu/payment-methods-transparency-index. Read at source between 24 September 2026 and 28 September 2026. A provider that believes a row is wrong can write to index@ecomstream.nl. Every reported correction is checked at the source.
October 2026
What 1 October 2026 does to the comparison, in euros
The date above is usually read as news about cards. It is also, and more consequentially, news about every method that competes with cards, which in an Australian checkout means this one.
Numbers. Take 5 million euros of Australian revenue with 20 per cent on Zip, so 1 million euros there and 4 million on cards. Suppose Zip costs 4.0 per cent all-in, so 40,000 euros. Suppose cards cost you 1.3 per cent but you currently surcharge a point of that back to the customer, leaving a net card cost of 0.3 per cent, so 12,000 euros. From 1 October the surcharge is gone. The same card volume now costs the full rate, so roughly 52,000 euros instead of 12,000. The RBA is lowering domestic interchange caps in the same package, so the 1.3 will come down somewhat, but it will not come down by a full point. Call it 40,000 euros a year landing on your margin, in one month.
Two consequences, and they pull in opposite directions. Your net card cost rises sharply, which narrows the gap to instalments and makes them look relatively better than they did. But your total acceptance cost rises across the board, which makes every point of substitution more expensive than it was. The first argues for showing instalments more prominently. The second argues for measuring substitution before you do. Run the measurement in the months before October, because from that date onwards you are deciding against a changed baseline with no clean before to compare it to.
Reviewing what this costs you
What you pay is set in your agreement, not by the scheme. Start by establishing whether you are overpaying your PSP, or run the payment set-up check on your own site, because this is the method where the distance between a negotiated rate and a standard one is widest.
Relevant markets: Australia, New Zealand, United States
Payment set-up check
Selling into Australia? Let's make sure your payment mix covers the local BNPL landscape.
Enter your webshop URL. The check names what your checkout misses in each of your markets, from missing local payment methods to surcharges and methods that no longer exist, each point with the service that addresses it.
Ramon Helwegen
