Card fees are roughly 2.9% plus 30 cents almost everywhere, so they are not what separates one platform from another. What separates them is the take on top, and how late you find out about it.
Shopify adds 0.6% to 2% depending on plan for using any gateway other than Shopify Payments. BigCommerce charges the same range for gateways outside its approved list, and moves a store onto a more expensive plan automatically once trailing twelve month revenue passes $30,000, and again at $100,000. That is not optional and not negotiable. Squarespace takes 2% on its entry plan. Square Online will not let you bring a processor at all.
Darkside Store is $149 a year and takes no platform cut at all. No platform fee, no revenue share, no GMV band, at any volume.
What the license covers
Products with variations, attributes, brands, SKUs, stock, low stock alerts, filters and storefront search. Cart, checkout, guest checkout, customer accounts and order history. Coupons with minimum spend, date ranges and free shipping. Shipping zones, methods and rate rules, with courier tracking for USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL and OnTrac. Tax rates by country, state, ZIP and city. Subscriptions and recurring billing. Digital downloads. Abandoned cart recovery. Stripe and PayPal natively, hosted or with card fields on the page, sandbox and live.
Courier tracking for USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL and OnTrac
For comparison, WooCommerce sells subscriptions at $279 a year, table rate shipping at $119 and PDF invoices at $149, on top of a store that was free until it was not.
The part nobody else on WordPress has
Product media in GLTF and GLB. Of ten platforms we compared, only Shopify matches it, and taking Shopify means moving the whole store off WordPress and accepting the gateway penalty unless you also take Shopify Payments. No WordPress competitor has it: not WooCommerce, not Easy Digital Downloads, not SureCart, not WP Simple Pay.
Video product media is native too, and reviews are restricted to verified purchasers in the box. Shopify needs an app for reviews at all, and whether that app can enforce verified purchase depends on which app you picked.
Billing the work as well as the goods
A shop covers products. It does not cover the quote you sent in March. Darkside Invoices is $49 a year and handles clients, quotes, invoices, subscriptions and part payments, with Stripe and PayPal, PDF generation, payment reminders and an audit trail of who changed what.
An invoice, raised and sent from the same site the work was quoted on
Its differentiator is change orders on an approved quote. Sliced Invoices, Sprout Invoices, GetPaid, Invoice Ninja and Jobber all lack it, and Jobber’s own product team has confirmed publicly that it remains an unshipped request. The consequence is familiar to anyone who has billed added work: the client never signed off, so when the invoice arrives higher than the quote there is no paper trail. Change orders are that paper trail.
Add Darkside Forms at $49 for intake, calculations and payment, and the money side of the site is three plugins deep rather than fifteen.