Card-Not-Present Isn't a Technicality, It's a Pricing Tier
If you run a shop and a website, you've probably noticed your online sales cost more in fees than your in-store ones, even on the exact same $50 order. That's not your imagination and it's not a billing error. Card networks price "card-not-present" (CNP) transactions higher than "card-present" ones because there's no chip, no tap, no physical card to verify. More fraud risk means a higher rate, and that rate gets baked into every single online sale you process, whether it's Stripe, Moneris, or anyone else running the transaction.
For a restaurant doing online ordering, a retailer with a Shopify store, or a clinic taking deposits through a booking page, this difference adds up fast. A business doing $30,000 a month online can easily pay $200 to $400 more per month in card fees than the same revenue run through a countertop terminal. Multiply that over a year and you're looking at real money that most owners never actually calculate, because the fee sits buried inside a percentage on a statement nobody reads line by line.
The Three Layers Hiding in Every E-commerce Transaction
Every card payment you accept online is made up of three separate charges stacked on top of each other, even though you only ever see one number.
Interchange is the fee set by Visa and Mastercard and paid to the cardholder's bank. For card-not-present consumer credit transactions in Canada, interchange generally runs somewhere between 1.4% and 2.5%, depending on the card type. A basic rewards card costs less to process than a premium travel card, and that's before your processor adds anything.
Assessment fees are a smaller network charge, usually in the range of 0.07% to 0.13%, that goes to Visa or Mastercard directly for running the rails.
Processor markup is what Stripe or Moneris adds on top to cover their own infrastructure, support, fraud tools, and profit. This is the only layer you can actually negotiate. Interchange and assessments are set by the networks and nobody, including your processor, can discount them.
When a provider quotes you "2.9%," that number already includes all three layers blended together. The problem is you can't tell from a flat rate how much of that is actually markup versus fixed network cost, which is exactly why flat-rate pricing tends to favour the processor as your volume grows.
What Stripe Actually Charges in Canada
Stripe's published Canadian pricing is straightforward on paper: 2.9% plus $0.30 CAD per successful transaction for standard Visa and Mastercard charges, with a higher rate (commonly 3.5% plus $0.30) for American Express. International cards and currency conversion each add roughly another 1% to 1.5% on top. There's no monthly fee and no contract, which is a real advantage for a new e-commerce business that doesn't know its volume yet.
The catch is that flat rate doesn't move as you grow. A business processing $10,000 a month and a business processing $150,000 a month pay the exact same percentage. Somewhere in that growth curve, the blended flat rate stops being competitive, because your actual interchange cost (as a mix of card types) rarely rises in lockstep with volume, but Stripe's margin on top of it stays fixed.
What Moneris Actually Charges in Canada
Moneris, as Canada's largest domestic processor, typically offers two structures for e-commerce: a flat-rate plan aimed at smaller merchants, and interchange-plus pricing for businesses with more predictable volume. Interchange-plus means you pay true interchange cost plus a fixed markup, often quoted somewhere between 0.30% and 1.00% over interchange, plus a small per-transaction fee (commonly $0.05 to $0.10).
On top of the discount rate, Moneris e-commerce setups often carry additional line items that don't show up in the headline rate: a monthly gateway or hosted-page fee (frequently $15 to $30), a PCI compliance fee ($5 to $10 a month if you're not already validated), and sometimes a batch or statement fee. None of these are hidden exactly, they're just spread across different lines of a statement that most owners glance at once a month and file away.
Interchange-plus pricing is almost always cheaper at real volume, because you're not paying a blended markup on every card type. But it only pays off if someone is actually reading the statement and catching when the markup creeps or a new fee gets added during a plan renewal.
A Side-by-Side Hypothetical: $40,000 a Month in Online Orders
Say an online retailer processes $40,000 a month in card-not-present sales, averaging $60 per order, mostly standard consumer Visa and Mastercard with a small slice of Amex.
Under a flat-rate model at roughly 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction, with about 666 transactions that month, the card fee works out to roughly $1,160 plus $200 in per-transaction fees, landing around $1,360 for the month.
Under an interchange-plus model, assume blended interchange and assessments average around 1.8%, plus a processor markup of 0.5%, plus $0.07 per transaction. That's roughly $920 in percentage-based fees plus $47 in per-transaction fees, plus a $20 gateway fee and $8 PCI fee, landing around $995 for the month.
That's a hypothetical gap of roughly $365 a month, or around $4,400 a year, on the exact same sales volume. These numbers are illustrative, not a quote, your actual card mix, average ticket size, and chargeback rate will move the math. But the pattern holds across most Canadian e-commerce businesses doing $25,000 or more a month: flat rate is simple, interchange-plus is usually cheaper once you clear a certain volume threshold.
The Costs That Don't Show Up on the Rate Card
The quoted percentage is never the whole story.
Chargebacks on card-not-present sales run higher than in-person disputes because there's no signature or chip verification to point to. A chargeback fee of $15 to $25 per incident adds up fast for a business with a return-heavy product line or subscription billing.
Currency conversion hits any Canadian seller taking US-dollar cards without a US settlement account, often at 1% to 2% on top of the base rate.
Early termination and PCI non-compliance fees are the two most common surprises when a business tries to leave a contract-based processor. Always ask for the exact dollar amount in writing before you sign anything, not just a verbal assurance it's "usually waived."
Settlement timing matters too. Some processors hold funds for 2 to 3 business days, others for longer on new accounts or high-ticket industries like construction deposits. That's a cash flow cost even if it never appears as a line-item fee.
How to Read Your Own Statement Before You Switch Anything
Before comparing providers, pull your last three monthly statements and find these numbers:
- Total card-not-present volume processed
- Total fees paid (percentage fees, per-transaction fees, and monthly fees added together)
- Your effective rate, calculated as total fees divided by total volume
- Number and dollar value of chargebacks
Most Canadian e-commerce merchants land somewhere between 2.2% and 3.1% effective rate once everything is included. If you're above 3%, there's almost always room to negotiate or switch. If you're below 2.4%, you're probably already on a reasonably competitive plan, and the bigger win might be in chargeback management or currency handling rather than the base rate.
When Switching Actually Makes Sense
Switching processors isn't free. There's a setup window, usually one to two weeks for a straightforward e-commerce integration, and you'll want to run parallel for at least one full billing cycle before cutting over completely. For a business under $10,000 a month in online sales, the savings from switching rate structures may not justify the hassle of re-integrating a payment gateway. For anyone clearing $20,000 or more a month, the math usually tips in favour of at least getting a real comparison done, because even a 0.4% difference on that volume is $80 a month that compounds every single month you don't act on it.
The only way to know which side of that line you're on is to actually run your numbers against an alternative, line by line, not percentage against percentage.
Get a free side-by-side comparison of what you pay now vs PaymentsPlus at paymentsplus.ca/quote