Shoper vs IdoSell: a subscription against a per-order fee

Shoper and IdoSell are the two dominant hosted eCommerce platforms in Poland, and they meter money in opposite directions. Shoper sells a monthly subscription with plan limits. IdoSell adds a flat fee to every order and states that it takes no commission on turnover. Which model hurts you depends on your average basket, and the crossover point sits far higher than most buyers assume.

If you sell into Poland from abroad, this choice arrives with the market. Both vendors ship Polish payment methods, Polish courier and parcel-locker integrations, Allegro connectivity and Polish tax compliance inside the subscription, which is the single reason either of them beats a global platform on this market.

We checked both price lists at source on 21 September 2026. All amounts are net of VAT.

Two billing mechanics and one line nobody counts

The short version both vendors repeat runs like this: Shoper sells a subscription with plan limits, IdoSell adds a flat fee per order and takes no cut of revenue. The description is accurate and incomplete.

Shoper charges a per-order fee as well. It hides inside the payment gateway. The full Shoper price list carries a sentence you will find in no platform comparison anywhere: a flat 0.39 PLN is added to every transaction fee charged in złoty through Shoper Payments. At a thousand orders a month that is 390 PLN alongside the subscription, more than the entire Standard plan.

The fee disappears when you plug in an external gateway. A different one appears.

Net of VAT, checked at the vendors on 21 September 2026: the full Shoper price list (page last updated 1 February 2026) and the IdoSell price list. IdoSell subscription amounts come from IdoSell’s own article of 23 July 2026 and from the comparison Shoper published on 14 August 2026, because the plan cards omit them. Euro figures converted at the NBP mid rate of 4.3545 PLN to 1 EUR, table A of 21 September 2026. We revisit this table quarterly.

The arithmetic on your own order volume

Take one store profile: an average basket of 200 PLN net (about 46 EUR), every payment through each vendor’s in-house gateway using BLIK or PayByLink, Shoper Standard on one side and IdoSell Business on the other. That combination is the most common shape of a mid-sized Polish store, and the only one that can be priced end to end from published rates.

Our calculation on published prices from 21 September 2026, net of VAT. Shoper: 299 PLN subscription plus 1.58% of turnover plus 0.39 PLN per transaction. IdoSell: 279 PLN subscription plus 1.59 PLN per order plus 1.49% of turnover. The Shoper rate is published as a floor, so that column is a lower bound rather than a price. At 3,000 orders you are realistically discussing higher plans, where the sum stops being computable from public data: Shoper rates for Premium and Pro are negotiated individually. Euro amounts at the NBP mid rate of 4.3545 PLN to 1 EUR, 21 September 2026.

Those two curves cross, and they cross high. At an average basket of roughly 1,330 PLN net, about 305 EUR, the bills meet: the higher per-order fee at IdoSell is exactly offset by the lower IdoPay rate. Below the threshold the Shoper model costs less, above it the IdoSell model does. We compute the threshold from the published floor of the Shoper rate, so a higher negotiated rate pushes it down.

Who holds your payment gateway

Here sits the difference you cannot see until you read the plan cards line by line. Two routes to payment acceptance, two different flavours of lock-in.

• IdoSell: on the Start and Business plans the vendor lists IdoPay alone and describes it as a permanent service. External gateways appear from Expert+ upwards, at zero surcharge for Klarna, PayPal, Stripe and InPostPay and 0.25% for other systems, dropping to 0.19% on Enterprise.
• Shoper: you can connect an external provider on any plan by paying Shoper 0.59% on top of the provider rate on Starter, Standard and Standard+, or 0.25% on Premium and Pro. Integrations the price list describes as unofficial cost 0.7% and 0.5%.

The practical effect is that one vendor charges a percentage of turnover for the freedom to choose, and the other charges a plan upgrade. If you already hold a good negotiated rate with a payment provider, price both routes separately, because the difference can exceed the whole subscription.

Contract terms, prepayment discounts and notice periods

The commercial models diverge outside the price list too. IdoSell publishes two contract templates, one for a fixed 12-month term and one for an indefinite term. Standard notice runs two months to the end of a calendar month and is extended to three at the explicit request of the customer, and the notice itself has to be given in writing with the customer number.

Shoper bills in subscription periods and rewards prepayment: 5% for three months, 7-8% for six, 9-10% for twelve and 20% for twenty-four. That discount is bought by freezing cash up front, so on a two-year prepayment, price it as you would price any other advance.

Trial periods are asymmetric as well: 14 days at Shoper, 7 days on the IdoSell demo.

Both platforms changed owner in 2026

One of those changes completed three weeks ago. On 1 September 2026 the registry court in Poznań entered the merger of cyber_Folks S.A. with Shoper S.A., and the entry struck the acquired company from the register. From that day cyber_Folks assumed all rights and obligations of Shoper.

For a store running on Shoper, less changes than the gravity of that operation suggests. The vendor tells customers that the Shoper brand stays, that logins and the admin panel work unchanged, that no new agreement needs signing and that the payment account number is the same. From 1 September the invoices are issued by cyber_Folks S.A., and the same date sits on the current terms of service.

On the other side the owner changed earlier. MCI Capital closed the sale of 100 percent of the shares in IAI S.A., the company behind IdoSell, to the Montagu fund on 2 March 2026, with net proceeds of 470.5 million PLN. IdoSell continues as a standalone product held by a private equity fund.

A conclusion rather than a quote from a filing: both platforms now answer to an owner who answers to investors, and that owner sets the order of the roadmap. Check the ownership structure as carefully as you check the price list.

Each vendor publishes a comparison of the other

Two competitors writing up each other in their own marketing is rare. It happened on both sides here, so the documents can be read alongside one another and separated into what is verifiable and what is positioning.

• Shoper on IdoSell (article updated 14 August 2026): stresses the absence of a separate per-order charge on Standard, Standard+ and Premium, quotes IdoSell subscriptions at 119, 279 and 729 PLN, and sets its own 14-day demo against a 7-day one.
• IdoSell on Shoper (article updated 18 June 2026): leads with a native B2B module, warehouse management, POS and more than 200 integrations as standard, cites limits of 200,000 to 1,500,000 SKUs against 50,000 on the entry Shoper plan, and reports close to 8,000 active stores turning over more than 16.5 billion PLN a year.

Both accounts are true in their numbers and both walk around the inconvenient part. Shoper never mentions the flat 0.39 PLN inside its gateway. IdoSell never mentions that its two cheapest plans list no external gateway at all.

Our own comparison carries a bias worth naming at the top: we build platforms on Medusa and earn from implementation work, not from either of these subscriptions. Which is why every figure above comes from a vendor, with a link and a date of checking.

Where each one wins

The verdict fits into two lists, cut down to things you can verify in a price list or in vendor documentation.

Shoper, on high volumes of small orders

• The bill does not grow with volume: on Standard, Standard+ and Premium the subscription is flat, and the only line tied to transaction count is the 0.39 PLN inside the gateway.
• An external gateway on any plan: for a 0.59% or 0.25% surcharge, with no need to climb the price list first.
• Month-to-month billing: no fixed term and no two-month notice, with a discount of up to 20% for merchants who prefer to pay two years in advance.
• A longer trial: 14 days without a payment card.

IdoSell, on high baskets and multichannel selling

• Fees scale with order count rather than revenue: at baskets in the thousands that model is clearly cheaper, which is what the 1,330 PLN threshold above measures.
• Marketplace orders in the same admin: transactions from Allegro, Amazon or eBay cost 0.55, 0.49 or 0.42 PLN depending on plan and travel the same fulfilment path as store orders.
• No feature gating between plans: the vendor states that every plan carries the full feature set, so a higher plan buys better rates rather than an unlocked module.
• Zero surcharge on four external gateways: Klarna, PayPal, Stripe and InPostPay, from Expert+ upwards.

A third answer belongs next to those two.

Staying where you are, when your store looks like this

We write this as a company that earns from moving stores off SaaS, so treat the section more seriously than the rest of the piece. On a small catalogue and straightforward selling, a hosted Polish platform beats an owned one, and there is nothing embarrassing about that.

• The catalogue fits the standard: a few hundred or a few thousand simple products, one sales channel, no B2B rules. An owned platform buys control you will never spend.
• Compliance stays with the vendor: mandatory e-invoicing through the Polish KSeF system began on 1 February 2026 for taxpayers whose 2024 sales exceeded 200 million PLN and on 1 April 2026 for everyone else, with a deferral to the end of 2026 for those invoicing under 10,000 PLN gross a month. On SaaS somebody else ships those updates.
• Nobody on your side maintains technology: an owned platform without continuous care fails more quietly and more expensively than a hosted one.
• The same money could go into range or a new channel: a migration eats a budget that, in a smaller store, usually works harder somewhere else.

When choosing between two SaaS platforms is the wrong question

Sometimes comparing these two price lists settles nothing, because the constraint sits outside both of them. Three symptoms give it away.

• The data model cannot hold your range: goods sold by the metre, in bundles, through a configurator or priced from parameters end up in description fields and in a spreadsheet alongside.
• Commercial rules are your advantage: contract pricing, credit limits and order approvals are the reason a customer buys from you rather than from the shop next door.
• The checkout belongs to someone else: the most sensitive part of the buying path sits outside your control, so every idea for it ends as a ticket in the vendor queue.

In that situation neither subscription answers the question, because both rent the same kind of ceiling. Our recommendation then is an owned platform, specifically Medusa, and we say so as a company that earns from building them. Three reasons, each of which you can verify without us:

• Ownership of code and data: the Medusa core ships under the MIT licence, so what you build stays with you together with the database. Enterprise edition materials sit under separate terms.
• No commission on turnover and no per-order fee: what remains on the bill is infrastructure, a payment gateway and maintenance. Order count leaves your software invoice entirely.
• B2B logic as code: contract pricing, credit limits and order approvals are written as workflows, instead of being checked against the limits of somebody else’s module.

We run migrations off Shoper and IdoSell ourselves, and they typically close in about 30 days, with the exact date and price fixed after the Blueprint. The old store keeps selling until the final hour and the cutover happens in a controlled window. The build itself sits in the Engineering stage: from 60,000 PLN net (about 13,800 EUR), typically 80,000 to 200,000 PLN (about 18,400 to 45,900 EUR), with ongoing care from 3,500 PLN a month (about 800 EUR). The scope of that work is set out on Medusa development.

And the caveat, without which this section would be a leaflet. On an owned platform you inherit the duties your vendor currently performs for you: keeping up with regulatory change, courier and accounting integrations, security, and somebody who deploys a fix on a Sunday evening. Every one of those has a price, and nobody shows it to you on an invoice while you stay on a subscription. Where the arithmetic lands on Shoper or IdoSell, we say so rather than sell a build that will not pay for itself.

The full three-year sum is broken down in our piece on the true cost of owning your platform, and the mechanics of moving without a trading gap in migration without stopping sales. If you are weighing a global hosted platform against these two, the same arithmetic for Shopify sits in Medusa vs Shopify. And where the bottleneck turns out to be sales channels rather than the platform, Amazon and Allegro account work is run by our sister brand Amazonway.

Limits of this comparison

Stated plainly, so the piece can be used as a source.

• IdoSell subscription amounts at source: the plan cards publish per-order fees and IdoPay rates, and on 21 September 2026 we found no monthly amount on them. The vendor distributes current price lists as PDFs inside the customer panel, and new ones took effect on 1 August 2026.
• The Expert+ discrepancy: IdoSell’s own article of 23 July 2026 gives 699 PLN, the Shoper comparison of 14 August 2026 gives 729 PLN. Confirm the figure with the vendor before signing.
• Individually negotiated terms: Shoper Payments rates on Premium and Pro, and the IdoSell Individual plan. Above the entry plans this sum cannot be computed from public data.
• Performance under load: we hold no comparative measurements of either platform and we do not repeat other people’s numbers.
• The cost of moving between them: neither vendor publishes a migration price. IdoSell cites roughly two weeks, with no amount attached.
• Anything after publication: prices on the Polish market move several times a year. We return to this page quarterly and leave a checking date beside every figure.

How to settle this on your own numbers

Four steps, each of which needs nothing but your own data.

• Pull twelve months: store order count, marketplace order count, average net basket and the mix of payment methods.
• Price both models on the same data: subscription plus per-order fee plus gateway rate, once for Shoper and once for IdoSell.
• Check which side of the 1,330 PLN threshold your basket falls on: below it the subscription wins, above it the per-order fee does. Near the threshold something other than price decides.
• Price the exit before the entry: what you can export, in which format, how long notice runs, and what stays behind, redirects and customer consents included.

Shoper and IdoSell solve the same problem with two billing mechanics, and choosing between them reduces to a single question: should your cost grow with order count or with revenue. The answer lives in your own reporting rather than in a vendor price list. Where both answers come out badly, the decision belongs a floor higher, at the level of who owns the checkout, the data model and the order of the roadmap.