Commercetools introduced Payment Hub, a new platform designed to give enterprises greater autonomy and control over their payment strategy by enabling them to negotiate directly with payment service providers. Payment Hub offers pre-built integrations and a simplified setup process with major payment service providers so that merchants are never locked into one provider.
The company wrote in its press release:
“As more commerce platforms shift to payments-first business models — where merchants are charged high transaction fees to subsidize software costs — commercetools takes a different approach. Unlike competitors that skim revenue through GMV-based fees, commercetools gives its customers full transparency and control over their payments with a commerce-friendly order processing model.”
They're talking about Shopify, which either gets a piece of all transactions that pass through its Shopify Payments network or charges merchants a transaction fee to use third-party providers, which nullifies any savings. The only real control Shopify gives merchants over what rate they pay to process payments is to choose which Shopify plan they're on — with the more costlier tiers reducing your payment processing rates.
Commercetools aims to be different by giving merchants full control over their payment service providers, lowering payment processing costs by enabling merchants to negotiate directly with providers, and allowing merchants to activate or deactivate payment service providers as they please.
So basically what BigCommerce has been doing since inception.
Alongside the launch of Payment Hub, the company announced that it has deepened its alliance with Stripe, positioning the payments provider as the inaugural global payment service provider to integrate with Payment Hub.