You can't avoid fees if you're accepting card payments. One way or another you will be relying on multiple specialist services to access the card networks and t

You can't avoid fees if you're accepting card payments. One way or another you will be relying on multiple specialist services to access the card networks and they are each going to take a cut. Cards are a broken and expensive payment method that needs to go away, and in some parts of the world that is already starting to happen, but it really depends on where your sales are. If you are aiming for customers in the US you're probably stuck with cards for now because it's what people and businesses expect to use. However if you're selling to somewhere like Europe you might get a much better deal with alternative payment methods like SEPA and the national schemes. There will still be fees and risks but they can be much lower than you'll ever get with card payments. Whichever payment method(s) you decide to accept you will still have to deal with the admin around taxes that has been mentioned elsewhere in this discussion. An alternative strategy of outsourcing everything to a specialist that handles both payment processing and tax admin is becoming increasingly attractive. As always if you're running a small business you might want to concentrate on whatever products or service you offer and outsource as much of the rest as you can. In this case the question isn't about how to avoid fees, because obviously you can't, but whether the amount you save is worth the fees you spend, which it easily could be.