The Payments Tax: Why Enterprises Are Paying More Than They Realize
According to Gartner, most enterprise tech budgets are set to rise this year.
But that doesn’t mean companies can afford to spend blindly, especially in a month where global markets reacted sharply to economic policy shifts and renewed volatility. In fact, the pressure is higher than ever to show not just ROI, but intentionality — to make sure that every dollar is allocated toward areas that actually move the business forward.
Which makes it all the more surprising that so many enterprises are still paying a hidden tax embedded in the platforms they rely on to power commerce.
The tax you didn’t budget for
I’m talking about payments.
More specifically: the cut that commerce platforms quietly take from every transaction, often without transparency, flexibility, or negotiation.
In stable times, it might be brushed off as “convenience.”
In today’s climate, it’s a margin siphon.
You launch on a commerce platform. It offers bundled payments. You scale, generate serious GMV, and suddenly, a portion of your revenue is going to your platform — not for processing payments, but simply for sitting in the middle.
This isn’t about the cost of payment services. It’s about the cost of control or more accurately, the loss of it.
The real issue isn’t payments — it’s platform power
Bundled payments might feel frictionless at launch. But for scaled enterprises, they become a drag: inflexible, opaque, and quietly expensive.
You don’t own the rate.
You don’t control the provider.
You can’t switch without a significant rebuild.
And most importantly: you probably don’t even know what you’re truly paying.
These fees don’t always show up clearly in your invoice. But they’re there embedded in contracts, buried in dashboards, and multiplied by every transaction across every channel.
Just a few weeks ago, I spoke with the Chief Product Officer at a multi-billion-dollar UK retailer. They’d just uncovered how much their commerce platform was skimming off the top and were already mapping a shift to independent payments and excited to use our newly released Payment Hub. Not just to lower fees, but to take back control.
That story isn’t rare. It’s becoming routine.
This isn’t just a financial issue. It’s a strategic one — and increasingly, a resilience issue.
The question for 2025 isn’t “How much are we spending on tech?” It’s “Where is our spend actually going — and who is it enabling?”
Commerce platforms that bundle payments and take a cut of GMV aren’t charging based on value delivered. They’re monetizing your lack of choice.
And that business model — charging like a payment processor while acting like a software vendor — is fundamentally misaligned with enterprise goals.
It might be tolerable in early-stage growth. But at scale, it’s a silent tax on profitability and a barrier to strategic agility.
Software should enable your business, not extract from it
At commercetools, we don’t take a cut of your revenue. We charge for what our platform does — not what our customers sell.
We believe software should be composable, flexible, and aligned with your business model — not locked down, opaque, or dependent on one-size-fits-all bundles.
When our customers want to switch payment providers, they can. No replatforming. No massive dev cycles. No renegotiated contracts. That’s the power of decoupled architecture.
And that’s what modern commerce should look like.
The bottom line
This is about spending in the right places.
Every dollar that disappears into platform fees is a dollar you can’t invest in differentiated experiences, faster experimentation, or new customer value.
So here’s a simple test for any enterprise leader:
If the answer to any of those is “no,” your platform isn’t serving your strategy. It’s siphoning from it.
The payments tax may not show up on your roadmap or vendor invoice. But it’s there, quietly compounding, quarter after quarter.
In a market that’s anything but predictable, that’s not a cost you can afford to overlook.
Ready to take control of your payments? Explore Payment Hub.