Shopify's store-credit fee divides shops at 12 May 2025

Same store credit, different Shopify bill: May 12 is the dividing line

Why it matters

Two shops can accept the same mix of card payment and store credit at checkout. If one was created before 12 May 2025 and the other on or after it, Shopify's third-party transaction fee treats the credit portion differently. The merchant issued the balance; the platform decides what it costs to spend it.

Mara Voss3 November 2026 at 09:52 UTCReading Time 2 minLast update: 3 November 2026

The fee follows store creation date, even when the credit payment looks the same. Conceptual illustration.

Summary

Shopify charges third-party transaction fees on the gift-card or store-credit portion of an order for stores created on or after 12 May 2025. Stores created earlier are exempt from that specific balance fee.
In Shopify's mixed-payment example, a customer uses a credit card and CAD 10 of store credit. The third-party transaction fee attaches only to the CAD 10 credit portion.

The checkout remembers the store's birthday

The customer sees a balance that the shop itself granted. They apply it to an order and pay the remainder by card. At one Shopify store, that balance slips through without a third-party transaction fee. At another, the identical payment mix puts a fee on the balance. The difference is the store's creation date: Shopify draws the line at 12 May 2025.

That is a peculiar place to hide an economic rule. Payment routing might look unchanged. Shopify Payments can process the card portion, while Shopify's own fee schedule treats store credit or a gift card as fee-bearing for the newer cohort. The fee is calculated on the balance used, not automatically on the whole mixed order. Shopify illustrates the split with CAD 10 of store credit alongside a card payment: the third-party transaction fee applies to that CAD 10.

The old cohort has an explicit exemption for this store-credit and gift-card fee. For a newer shop, a loyalty credit, service recovery credit or gift card can reach checkout with a cost that was absent when the shop first promised value to the customer. The help page supplies no universal rate; the plan and market determine the actual amount. A merchant needs its store creation date and transaction-fee schedule before pricing a credit campaign.

Refunds make the timing less forgiving. Shopify says that where Shopify Payments is available in the store's country, third-party transaction fees are not returned when an order is refunded. Where Shopify Payments is unavailable, Shopify credits the fee proportionally to the refund. The same fee rule therefore interacts with geography as well as store age. Manual payments and point-of-sale orders follow separate exclusions; they are not the online balance route at issue here.