How much of my international sale actually gets eaten by FX markup, gateway fees and chargebacks?
The short answer
Between payment gateway fees (roughly 2-4% for card payments), FX conversion markup (anywhere from near-zero on mid-market platforms to 4%+ on PayPal), and international chargeback rates that run higher than domestic, it's realistic to lose 5-10% of an international order's value before you even account for shipping and duty. Model this into your landed-cost pricing explicitly rather than treating it as a rounding error, it's often bigger than your ad spend per order once you add it all up. Switching from a high-markup gateway to a mid-market-rate platform for settlement alone can recover several points of margin.
A quick summary to orient you. The real value is below: the resources worth your time, from people who've actually done it, not us.
Here are the resources
Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time. India-specific ones carry a badge.
2 resources1 India-specific2 link-checked
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Why we picked it
A founder's-eye view of why cross-border payments infrastructure stays invisible until it breaks, useful as a gut-check for why 'just use PayPal' is not a real strategy once volume grows.
Why we picked it
Razorpay's own guide, written as an Indian payment aggregator now licensed for cross-border transactions, covers the practical settlement and compliance stack from a platform actually operating in this space.
