Here is the part nobody mentions when they hand you a free card reader: the reader is free because the rate is not. The little machine on your counter costs nothing up front because the company behind it takes a slice of every single sale instead. On a busy shop that slice is the most expensive thing in the building, and you will never see it as a bill. It just quietly leaves before the money reaches you.
Connect with us about retail software · · Replies within 24 hours
Walk into most independent UK shops and the till setup looks settled. A screen, a barcode scanner, a receipt printer and a cash drawer. Then a small card terminal that arrived in the post, free or nearly so. That last device is the one to watch. The hardware was a gift. The percentage taken on every tap is the real product, and it never stops running.
This matters more in convenience retail than almost anywhere else, because the sector runs on volume and thin margins. The ACS Local Shop Report 2024 counts 50,387 convenience stores in the UK. Independent retailers run 71% of them, and not the large chains. These are owner-operated shops where a single percentage point on card fees is the difference between a decent month and a flat one.
Card now dominates the counter. A customer buys a meal deal, a newspaper or one can. They tap a card or a telephone. Part of that sale is gone before it reaches your account. Charge it on every basket, every hour, every day of the year, and the total is large. The trouble is it never appears as a number you have to approve. It is deducted at source, so it feels like the weather rather than a cost you could change.
The genuinely surprising part is what happens with many of the modern cloud tills. Two charges, not one, and they often go to the same company.
First the monthly software fee. Epos Now advertises a system at £199, down from £849. That price needs a support and payments subscription from £54 a month, plus the card fees. The contract runs 12 to 36 months. So the cheap-looking till is a monthly commitment, and the card processing sits on top.
Then the skim. Square and Zettle charge about 1.75% on every card sale. Their basic level has no monthly software fee. That model feels fair because there is no subscription, but the rate is doing the heavy lifting. The free reader and the simple pricing are funded entirely by the percentage.
Put those two together and you pay twice. A monthly fee to one company to run your till. A share of every card sale to the same company. You are renting the software and paying a toll on your own revenue at the same time. Neither charge is visible at the counter. Both are real.
Rates look tiny in isolation. The way to see them is to apply them to a real shop. Take a store doing about £15,000 a month in card sales, which is unremarkable for a convenience store. The figures below are an example. We worked them out from the prices each provider publishes. Read them as a fair comparison, and not as a quote.
| Provider | Headline rate | Cost per month | Cost per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Square | 1.75% per card sale | About £262.50 | About £3,150 |
| Zettle (PayPal) | 1.75% per card sale | About £262.50 | About £3,150 |
| SumUp (0.99% plan) | 0.99% plus £19 a month | About £167.50 | About £2,010 |
| Stripe Terminal | 1.4% plus 20p per transaction | About £240 | About £2,880 |
| Revolut | 0.8% plus 2p per transaction | About £130 | About £1,560 |
The spread is the story. The 1.75% providers cost about £3,150 a year on this shop. Revolut, at 0.8% plus 2p, comes to about £130 a month, roughly £1,560 a year, according to ESRE Media's framework calculation from Revolut's pricing. SumUp's 0.99% plan and Stripe's 1.4% land in between. Same shop, same takings, same customers tapping the same cards. The only thing that changed is the rate, and the gap is well over a thousand pounds a year.
The cheaper route does carry two small fixed costs. A terminal at about £169 plus VAT, paid once. A Revolut Business account at £10 a month. Even with those included, the percentage saving dwarfs them.
Over £1,500 a year is not abstract. It lands in the middle of a genuine squeeze on these shops. The National Living Wage rose to £12.71 an hour on 1 April 2026. That is 4.1% above £12.21. The National Minimum Wage (Amendment) Regulations 2026 set it. That followed a £11.44 rate in April 2024, itself a 9.8% rise that year, according to the ACS.
And the headline wage understates the real burden. The University of Stirling counted everything an employer pays. It put the real cost at about £15.39 an hour in 2024. That came before the 2026 rise, so it is now higher. Owners take the strain the hard way. ACS figures for 2024 show that 53% of retailers cut what they spent. 47% took less profit. A saving on card fees needs no negotiation, and no new staff. Against all of that, it is one of the few things an owner can do alone.
So if Revolut is cheaper, why does every shop not simply switch? Because in most setups the card processing is welded to the till. The cloud platform chose its payments partner, baked the rate into the system, and made it the path of least resistance. To change the rate you would have to change the whole platform, and the platform is what your day runs on.
That is the trap. The rate costs you the most, and you control it least. It is tied inside software you rent rather than own. You did not choose 1.75%. It came with the box. The box is leased, so a change means disruption, a new contract and retraining. That is why most owners never change.
Ask why the till and the card rate arrive together. The answer explains the whole article.
A cloud till costs a vendor money to build and to run. Selling it at its true price would price it out of a corner shop. So the till is cheap, or free, and the payments carry the cost. Your rate is not a price you negotiated. It is how the till gets paid for.
We separate the two, because we can. Every shop we build for shares one foundation, so a system of your own costs a few thousand pounds rather than tens of thousands. There is nothing left to recover from your card sales, so you choose your own processor.
We explain how a whole sector shares one foundation in bespoke software for a whole sector. We set out the real cost in what does it cost to own and run your own systems.
This is where ownership changes the maths. A bespoke shop system that you own outright does not marry your till to one payment company. The card processing is a component you can choose, and swap, on your terms. Decouple it, point it at the cheapest reputable rate, and the saving stays in your pocket instead of funding someone else's free hardware.
The practical change is smaller than people fear. You keep the kit you already have. The existing screen, the USB barcode scanner, the receipt printer and the cash drawer all stay. The only thing that gets swapped is the card reader itself, for a Revolut Terminal at about £169 plus VAT. The shop looks identical from the customer's side. Only the rate underneath has changed, from around 1.75% to 0.8% plus 2p.
The ESRE Media shop demo already runs this way. The till scans an item, or takes a typed code. It takes a card through a Revolut Terminal, or takes cash. It prints a receipt, and lowers the stock on every sale. It works offline, so if the internet drops the till keeps trading and syncs later, and it does an end-of-day cash reconciliation. The card rate is a setting, not a life sentence.
The deeper point is that card fees are one symptom of a bigger pattern. The usual shop pays four times. For a till. For stock software. For a website. For a percentage on every card. It then joins all of it by hand. Each tool is rented. Each one is a monthly fee or a skim. None of them truly belongs to the owner.
A bespoke owned system replaces that scatter with one source of truth. One system holds all of it, and it is yours. The till. Live stock, which falls by itself and warns you when a line runs low. Supplier ordering, which proposes a purchase order from the levels you set. Reports on the margin for each line, top sellers, dead stock, the busiest hours and VAT by rate. The website too. You own it outright. No monthly software fee. No licence fees. No lock-in. If the relationship with ESRE Media ended tomorrow, the system keeps running, because it is your property, not a subscription.
It is built to be taken seriously from day one. A full audit trail. Automatic backups. Data on secure UK servers. A return to any second, through a write-ahead log. A core build of your own starts at about £2,000 to £3,000, paid once. You own it outright, with no monthly software fee. More sites, a staff rota or a website in the same system cost more. For a second shop, a multi-site system of your own costs about £2,000 to £3,000. A second premium dealer till costs £5,000 to £7,000.
Owning the system also means you are not frozen at the version you bought. AI tools grew good enough in December 2025 for your own team to change the system in plain English. They work in safe environments, with version control and automatic backups. You describe what you want changed, the change is made and tested safely, and if it is wrong it rolls back. That is a very different position from waiting on a vendor's roadmap and paying for every tweak.
It is built quickly too, in weeks rather than months, noticeably fast in use, and made to last and grow with the business. And there is a genuine safety net: if something ESRE Media built is faulty, it is fixed at no cost, with no time limit. Early clients also get free permanent hosting for a limited time. This is the opposite of a rented till. You pay once, and you own what you get. Every saving is yours to keep, and that includes the card fees.
None of this requires ripping out your shop. You keep the hardware and change the reader. You stop paying a percentage you never chose. You then own the system. The free card reader was never the gift it looked like. The real gift is owning the till it plugs into.
Connect with us about retail software · · Replies within 24 hours
If you want to understand the ownership argument in full, read why bespoke, or see the range of work on the projects page.
You can see this in a working system. The ESRE live retail demo opens with no login, and it shows the work in this guide. Sign in as owner and see the card fee report by processor, or as staff and ring the sale with live margin. It is a working system, not a screenshot.