Following every Black Friday Cyber Monday, revenue records make headlines. Adobe tracked $44.2 billion in US online sales across the 5-day Cyber Week window in 2025, up 7.7% year over year. But what doesn’t make headlines is how much you pay in fees to process all those transactions. Payments are the largest, least-examined cost of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Here’s what peak-volume sales cost you, and how to keep more of it.

Say you spend months negotiating your processor down from 2.5% to 2.1%. You take that rate into Cyber Week, see $2M in sales, and your processing costs go up by $3,167. When you look into it, you find that your new rate was in place, but your platform charged you for using it.

Gateway fees that tax your success

There are 2 important line items to examine in your Cyber Week statement. The first is what it costs to move money: things like interchange, network assessments, and your processor’s markup.…