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.
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Walk into most independent UK shops and the till setup looks settled. A screen, a barcode scanner, a receipt printer, a cash drawer, and a small card terminal that arrived in the post for free or close to it. 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. There are 50,387 convenience stores in the UK, and 71% of them are run by independent retailers rather than the major multiples, according to the ACS Local Shop Report 2024. 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. The customer buying a meal deal, a newspaper or a single can taps a card or a phone, and a fraction of that sale is gone before it lands in 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, for example, advertises a system at £199 (reduced from £849), but that headline price requires a support and payments subscription from £54 per month plus card processing, on a 12 to 36 month contract, according to Epos Now. So the cheap-looking till is a monthly commitment, and the card processing sits on top.
Then the skim. Square and Zettle charge around 1.75% on every card sale, with no monthly software fee on the basic tier, according to Square and Zettle (PayPal). That model feels honest 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 the two patterns together and you can end up paying a company a monthly fee to run your till AND letting the same company take a cut of every card sale that goes through it. 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 illustrative, calculated by ESRE Media's framework from each provider's published pricing, so treat them as a clear like-for-like rather than 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.
To be fair to the lower-cost route, Revolut has a couple of small fixed costs to note: a terminal at about £169 plus VAT as a one-off, and a £10 a month Revolut Business account, according to Revolut's pricing. 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 per hour on 1 April 2026, a 4.1% increase from £12.21, under The National Minimum Wage (Amendment) Regulations 2026 on legislation.gov.uk. 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 put the true, fully-loaded cost of employment at about £15.39 per hour in 2024 once on-costs are included, a figure published before the 2026 wage rise, so the real number is now higher. Owners are absorbing this the hard way: 53% of retailers cut investment and 47% took lower profits to cope with wage rises, according to ACS 2024 figures. Against that backdrop, a card-fee saving that needs no negotiation and no new staff is one of the few levers an owner can pull on their own.
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 thing costing you the most, the rate, is the thing you have the least control over, because it is bundled inside software you rent rather than own. You did not choose 1.75%. It came with the box. And because the box is leased, switching it out means disruption, a new contract, and retraining, which is exactly why most owners never do it.
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 or types items, takes payment by card via a Revolut Terminal or by cash, prints a receipt, and decrements stock automatically 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 typical shop pays for a till, separately pays for stock software, separately pays for a website, separately pays a percentage on cards, and stitches the lot together with manual work. 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. The till, live stock with automatic decrement and low-stock alerts, supplier ordering that proposes purchase orders from thresholds you set, reports on margin per line, top sellers, dead stock, busiest hours and VAT by rate, and even the website, all in one system that is yours. 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 complete audit trail, automated backups, data held on secure UK servers, and the ability to roll back to any second via a write-ahead log. A bespoke core build starts around £2,000 to £3,000 as a one-off, owned outright with no monthly software fee, according to ESRE Media's internal offer; larger scopes such as multi-site, a staff rota or an integrated website cost more and those larger figures are illustrative. For an owner opening a second shop, a multi-site bespoke system at roughly £2,000 to £3,000 is materially cheaper than a second premium dealer till, which can run to £5,000 to £7,000, according to ESRE Media's internal research.
Owning the system also means you are not frozen at the version you bought. Since December 2025, AI tools have matured to the point where your own team can evolve the system in plain English, inside failsafe environments with version control and automated 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. The whole proposition is the opposite of the rented till: you put the money in once, you own the result, and the savings, including the card-fee saving, are yours to keep.
None of this requires ripping out your shop. You keep the hardware, you swap the reader, you stop paying a percentage you never chose, and you sit on a system that belongs to you. The free card reader was never the gift it looked like. The real gift is owning the till it plugs into.
Speak to us about retail software · +44 7494 618 651 · Mon to Fri, 9am to 6pm
If you want to understand the ownership argument in full, read why bespoke, or see the range of work on the projects page.