Shopify Payments alternatives that actually change something.

Option 1 — A third-party gateway inside Shopify’s checkout

This is the option every listicle covers. You turn off Shopify Payments, pick a gateway from Shopify’s approved list, and Shopify’s checkout hands the card off to them.

It’s the least disruptive change you can make, and for a lot of stores it’s the right one. Two things are worth knowing before you assume it solves your problem.

• Shopify charges an additional transaction fee on orders that don’t go through Shopify Payments. The exact percentage depends on your plan, and it applies per order, on top of whatever your gateway charges.
• You’re still inside Shopify’s checkout. The page, the fields, the layout and the order of steps are Shopify’s. If your reason for leaving was the checkout experience rather than the processor, this changes nothing.
• Availability varies by country, and a gateway that will approve a high-risk category is a much shorter list than the full one.

Option 2 — Manual payment methods

Bank transfer, cash on delivery, invoices, crypto handoffs. Shopify allows these and they cost nothing in gateway fees.

They also ask a stranger on the internet to complete a multi-step payment with no card, which is why almost nobody uses them as a primary method for consumer products. Useful as a supplement for wholesale or a specific market. Not a replacement.

Option 3 — Move the checkout off Shopify

The structural fix. Your storefront, catalogue, theme and fulfilment stay on Shopify. The checkout step points at a page on your own domain, which charges through a processor account that belongs to you — in CrispCheckout’s case, your own Whop account. When the charge succeeds, the paid order is written back into Shopify Admin so nothing downstream notices the difference.

This is the only option of the three where a Shopify Payments decision — a hold, a reserve, a deactivation — has no path to the money, because the money was never in that account. That’s separation, not immunity: any processor anywhere has its own risk rules. But your revenue no longer sits inside the one account tied to the storefront.

• You control the checkout page: order bumps, reviews, guarantees, timers, custom copy, your branding.
• Payouts follow your own processor’s schedule rather than Shopify Payments’ 5–7 business days.
• Subscriptions and free trials can run natively on the processor instead of through a separate subscription app.
• The trade: Shop Pay and Shopify checkout extension apps are no longer in the path, and there’s a software fee for the checkout layer.

How to choose

Work backwards from what actually went wrong.

• Processing costs too much → compare gateways, and price in Shopify’s third-party transaction fee before you decide.
• You want a better-converting checkout page → only option three touches the page.
• You’ve been flagged, reserved, held, or deactivated → option one keeps you inside the same risk framework. Option three is the one that separates the money from the storefront.
• You sell subscriptions and hate the app stack → option three, if the processor handles renewals natively.

What it costs to move the checkout

For CrispCheckout specifically: free to build — the full builder and unlimited test orders, no card required — then $99/month plus a flat 0.5% per order once you go live. Card processing itself is your own Whop account’s rate; we never sit inside your money.

The comparable product, Lasso, is roughly twice that in software fees. We wrote a straight comparison rather than making you dig for it.