Payment gateways in Greece: what you actually pay

It is one of the most common questions I get when we build an online shop, and it is phrased wrongly. “Which payment gateway should I use?” The right question is “what will I pay per transaction, to whom, and how do I verify it?” Because “which gateway” is answered in two minutes, while the second one is what you will be looking at on your statement every month for the next ten years.

And there is a reason you struggle to answer it yourself: in the Greek market you are not comparing like with like. Two providers publish a price list that anyone can read. The banks invite you to an appointment. So let us look at what is actually written down, and then at what you are entitled to demand.

One disclosure before we start, so you do not think I am hiding anything: we use Stripe in our own products. I take no commission from any provider and have no commercial relationship with any of them. The figures below come from their own official pages as published in August 2026, and they change.

First things first: the fee is not one thing

This is where most people lose the thread. The percentage you see does not go to one recipient. It is the sum of three separate things.

The interchange fee goes to the bank that issued your customer’s card. The scheme fees go to Visa or Mastercard. The acquirer’s margin goes to whoever signed your contract.

That is not my framing, it is the law’s. Regulation (EU) 2015/751 expressly treats them as three separate components, and it caps the first: 0.2% for debit cards under Article 3 and 0.3% for credit cards under Article 4, on consumer card transactions.

Now do the subtraction almost nobody does. If you are paying 2% on a domestic debit card, 0.2% goes to the issuer. The remaining 1.8% is split between the scheme and your acquirer. Now you know where the negotiating room actually is, and it is not where you thought.

The right you have and never exercise

Here is the part that would justify the article on its own. The same regulation, in Article 9(2), obliges your acquirer to provide individually specified information on the amount of the merchant service charges, the interchange fees and the scheme fees, separately.

In other words, you are entitled to ask for a breakdown rather than accept a single blended percentage. It is not a favour and it is not a negotiating trick, it is their obligation. How many merchants have asked for it? Very few, because very few know. Ask, and you will see immediately whether the rate you are being offered is competitive or merely round.

What Stripe publishes

From Stripe’s own Greek pricing page, in August 2026:

And three more that nobody looks at until they happen: €20 for every dispute you receive, another €20 if you respond to it manually, and 1% with a €0.50 minimum if you want an instant payout rather than the normal one.

Look closely at the “premium EEA cards” line. Same Europe, same customer, and the difference between 1.5% and 2.8% is close to double the charge because your customer happened to be holding a rewards card. You do not choose it and you do not know before the payment.

What Viva publishes

From Viva.com’s pricing page, in August 2026:

The third line is not an offer, it is legislation, and Viva says so itself by citing Article 50 of law 5167/2024. More on that below.

It is also worth knowing exactly what the provider is: the Viva.com group owns VIVABANK, which is a credit institution licensed by the Bank of Greece. It is not an intermediary sitting on top of a bank, it is a bank.

The banks, and a silence that says a lot

This is the most interesting finding of the research, and it is an absence of data.

Alpha Bank writes that there are no connection costs and no periodic charges, and that you are charged a fee per transaction “which will be agreed with the Branch you do business with”. Piraeus and NBG point to a fee schedule without showing a percentage on the product page. We also went through Alpha’s official 2025 terms-of-business document: it contains no e-commerce card acceptance rates at all.

I found two exceptions, and I report them because it is only fair: Eurobank publishes 0.85% for its Payment Link service and €0.30 per transaction for IRIS in e-commerce.

I am not going to tell you the banks are more expensive, because I do not know and neither do you. That is precisely the problem. You walk into a negotiation with no benchmark, and the only public benchmark that exists today is Stripe’s 1.5% and Viva’s 2.19%. Take them with you to the appointment.

The Greek small-transaction law half the market ignores

Article 50 of law 5167/2024 is genuinely useful and I am surprised more people do not know it. For transactions up to twenty euro made with consumer debit, credit and prepaid cards, it sets maximum charges: a 0.50% merchant clearing fee, 0.10% to 0.15% interchange depending on card type, and a 0.10% international scheme fee. It applies to defined retail categories, for three years.

So if your average order value is under twenty euro, this is not a detail, it is half your economics. And it is the first thing to check on this month’s statement.

The authentication that kills your baskets, and its exemptions

Your customer reaches the last step, the bank asks for a code, they cannot remember it, they leave. You have lived this. It is not your shop’s fault.

It is Strong Customer Authentication, governed by Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2018/389, which under Article 38 applies from 14 September 2019. I give the date because it circulates widely as “since 2021”, which is wrong.

The same regulation provides exemptions, and they are worth knowing so you can raise them with your provider:

Low value (Article 16): a remote transaction up to €30, with a cumulative limit of €100 or five consecutive transactions since the last authentication.

Transaction risk analysis (Article 18): if the provider’s fraud rate sits below the reference rates, the exemption reaches up to €500, with intermediate bands at €250 and €100.

Recurring (Article 14): authentication on the first one only, where a series follows with the same amount to the same payee. Critical for subscriptions.

Trusted beneficiaries (Article 13): your customer adds you to a list, and subsequent payments are exempt.

The exemption is applied by the provider, not by you. But if you know it exists, you can ask why it is not being applied.

How much of this actually matters

The European Central Bank gives the shape of it: remote card transactions are 19% of the number and 30% of the value of card payments in the euro area. So e-commerce is smaller in volume than we tend to assume, but with a larger average basket.

For Greece specifically, I owe you an unhelpful fact: the Bank of Greece does not publish a usable headline figure for card transaction volume on its statistics pages. Those pages describe the reporting regime and point elsewhere. Numbers circulate in the press, but I am not reproducing them because I could not find them at source.

So what do you actually do

I am not going to tell you which one to pick, because it depends on your average basket, on whether you sell outside Europe, and on whether you have a physical shop. I will tell you what to hold on to.

The percentage on its own means nothing without the fixed fee per transaction, and on a ten euro basket it is the fixed fee that hurts. Ask for the three components itemised, because you are entitled to them. If you sell in small amounts, check whether the 5167/2024 cap applies to you. And remember that the prices you read here are August 2026 and will change, so open the official pages before you sign anything.

Which brings us back to the opening question, now phrased properly. Not “which gateway”, but “what am I paying, to whom, and how do I see it itemised”. If you would like to go through it on your own numbers, before the shop is built rather than after, get in touch.