In a webshop, payment takes just a few seconds — but from the operator's side, it sits on top of one of the most important technical and business decisions you'll make. It matters how much a transaction costs, how quickly the merchant actually receives the money, which payment methods the customer sees, how refunds work, how complicated the integration is, and of course whether the system will still hold up if the webshop later expands abroad.
In Hungary, three providers almost always come up in this decision: Barion, SimplePay and Stripe are alternatives that all deserve serious consideration. At first glance it would be easy to compare them purely on transaction fees, but that rarely leads to a good decision. A webshop serving mostly Hungarian customers can have entirely different needs than a brand selling in several countries. A classic product webshop may need a different payment setup than a subscription service or a marketplace.
So the question worth asking is this: which one fits your webshop's business model best?
Online payment used to be a nice-to-have feature...
According to data from the Hungarian National Bank (MNB), 42 percent of all payments in the Hungarian economy were made electronically in 2024. In a single year, the number of electronic transactions grew by more than 200 million, with over 2.5 billion electronic payments carried out in total.
The growth of card payments is even more striking. In 2019, purchases made with cards issued by Hungarian providers totalled around HUF 7,700 billion — by 2024, that figure had climbed to roughly HUF 19,700 billion. The number of transactions roughly doubled in five years, and the share of online purchases keeps growing. This matters for webshops because the payment step is no longer just the technical closing of an order: it's one of the most sensitive points of the entire checkout.
The Baymard Institute has been studying cart abandonment for years; based on their research, the average rate internationally still hovers around 70 percent. Some shoppers abandon the process because they don't trust the site enough, others find the checkout too complicated, or simply can't find the payment method they want to use. In other words, you can't calculate the true cost of a payment provider from the transaction fee alone. If a system is a few tenths of a percent more expensive but more purchases actually make it through to a completed payment, it can still be the cheaper solution for your business.
Barion: particularly strong regional presence
Barion has long been a well-known player in Hungarian e-commerce. At its core, the system offers classic online card acceptance, but by now it can do considerably more.
Among other things, it supports Apple Pay and Google Pay, saved-card payments, recurring charges, two-step (authorize and capture) payments, as well as various platform and marketplace-style setups. With the traditional Barion integration, the customer is redirected to the provider's own hosted payment page. This has real significance from a security standpoint: the webshop's own system never handles card data directly — something that could otherwise be a serious trust-killer and conversion-breaker for lesser-known webshops. It also reduces the merchant's PCI DSS compliance workload and means a smaller security exposure than routing card data through the webshop's own infrastructure.
On top of all this, an API, a sandbox environment and multiple ready-made integrations are available. Barion works with practically every well-known webshop engine, and it can be built into custom developments as well.
One of Barion's attractive traits is its public pricing — though it's worth reading together with the conditions attached. Under the fee schedule effective from April 2026, for a monthly average turnover below HUF 5 million, the Starter Fix plan's card acceptance fee is 1.49 percent, while Advanced Fix is 1.19 percent. At higher volumes these rates drop. Above HUF 16 million in monthly average turnover, for example, the public fee table includes rates of 1.09 and 0.69 percent. At first glance this looks very attractive — but there are a few conditions.
The Fix pricing comes with requirements such as a minimum average basket value and a suitable card mix. If, for example, the share of foreign or corporate cards is too high, a different pricing model can kick in. For a webshop selling predominantly in Hungary this isn't necessarily a problem, but if the business plans to target foreign markets in the near future, it's worth factoring in when choosing a provider.
SimplePay: deeply rooted in the Hungarian market
A large share of Hungarian shoppers know SimplePay well, and that alone counts for something in a payment flow. Alongside traditional card payments, SimplePay supports Apple Pay and Google Pay, card storage, recurring payments, two-step charging, payment links and several other solutions — but what really sets it apart from its competitors is its tight connection to the Hungarian payment system, which makes it qvik-compatible.
The name qvik rings a bell for many, as it's built on Hungary's instant payment system. On desktop, payment is initiated via a QR code; on mobile, through a direct app-to-app connection, with the customer approving it in their own mobile banking app. In practice, this means no card details are needed to pay. The solution is also noteworthy because it works with every Hungarian mobile banking app and is free of charge for retail customers.
As a merchant, it's important to see that SimplePay's pricing follows a different logic than Stripe's or Barion's public Fix packages.
According to the provider, merchants should expect a connection fee and a transaction commission, but the exact terms depend on the individual merchant agreement — so there's no universal percentage that could be meaningfully compared across all webshops. Before any serious decision, it's worth requesting a concrete quote and then modelling it against your own traffic data.
Stripe: a different scale, a different mindset
Stripe is often lumped into the same category as Barion or SimplePay, yet it partly plays a different role. It's not simply a card acceptance system but a much broader payment infrastructure. This becomes truly important when a webshop sells in more than one country.
In Stripe's public Hungarian pricing, a standard EEA-issued card transaction costs 1.5 percent plus HUF 85. Higher fees apply to other card types, and currency conversion can add further costs. For a webshop handling low-value orders, that fixed HUF 85 per transaction can carry noticeable weight. With an average basket of ten or twenty thousand forints the ratio looks very different than with, say, HUF 2,000 transactions.
Stripe's real advantage, however, isn't necessarily in the base fee. The system offers more than a hundred payment methods and very broad international currency support. In many countries, the locally preferred payment options can be switched on within the same infrastructure. For international expansion, that's serious value.
More payment methods don't automatically mean a better checkout
It's easy to fall into the trap of wanting to display as many payment methods as possible at once: card, bank transfer, Apple Pay, Google Pay, qvik, various wallets and further alternatives stacked on top of each other, in the hope that more choice means better conversion. But that's not necessarily how it works.
What matters is that the customer finds the payment methods they actually want to use. Too many unfamiliar options tend to breed uncertainty rather than trust.
At the same time, mobile payment apps are becoming increasingly important. According to the Worldpay Global Payments Report, digital wallets already accounted for more than half of global e-commerce spending in 2025. For many webshops, Apple Pay and Google Pay are therefore no longer a special extra, but a natural part of the mobile shopping flow.
How should you calculate the real cost?
One of the most common mistakes when comparing payment providers is lining up only the base transaction percentages. Needless to say, that won't get you far.
It's worth building at least a full-year model. Factor in the number of transactions, the average basket value, the card mix, the share of foreign customers, currency conversion, the number of refunds, possible chargebacks, subscription transactions and the fees of any extra services.
The technical side can carry significant costs too. A given provider might be a few tens of thousands of forints cheaper per month on the transaction side, while its integration and ongoing maintenance eat up far more developer hours. In such cases, the seemingly more expensive provider can end up being the better deal overall.
We built Sellvio so that integrating the various payment methods is a core feature of the webshop platform — so it never becomes a headache for merchants.