Why Use a Payment Gateway and How to Optimize Fees

Having a payment gateway is essential today because people have different payment preferences. Each generation favors different methods, but card payments have become a universal skill – they're fast and convenient.

With the Stripe payment gateway, you can also accept modern and even faster options like Apple Pay and Google Pay.

The main benefit of card payments is the time it saves you – not only for handling bookings, but also for cancellations and unpaid orders. Zenamu automatically cancels unpaid bookings after 1 hour. With card payments, all transactions are handled automatically, eliminating the need to manually verify payments in your bank account or mark them as paid.

Just like card networks, payment gateways charge fees for their services. Stripe’s fees include a fixed amount per transaction plus a percentage of the total amount. You can view Stripe’s pricing here: https://stripe.com/en-cz/pricing

While you can’t avoid card payment fees entirely, there are a few ways to reduce their impact:

This helps you avoid the fixed transaction fee, since the card payment happens only once when clients purchase credits or passes – after that, everything runs through the internal credit/pass system.

This lets you keep the option for walk-ins or clients who prefer not to register (since credits require a registered account) while covering the card fee at the same time.

A small price increase can help cover the transaction fees without disrupting your overall pricing model.