You want to take card payments on your site. The question sounds simple and is not, because the answer depends on three things at once: which bank accepts you, how long the paperwork takes, and who issues the fiscal receipt.
This article is the map. The build cost is at the end.
What you are actually choosing between
Three categories with different economics.
A bank directly. A contract with the bank, a commission negotiated with them, money arriving in your account from them. The longest paperwork, usually the lowest commission.
An aggregator. A fintech company sits between you and the banks. Shorter paperwork, faster integration, usually a higher commission — you are paying for speed.
An international processor. Stripe, PayPal. Here the problem is not price, it is eligibility. See below.
The Moldovan options
MAIB
The best documented of all of them. It has public developer documentation, a merchant portal where you configure settings and issue refunds, plugins for the common platforms, and an API/SDK if you want your own integration.
The process, as they describe it in their integration
steps:
download a questionnaire, complete it, send it with the requested documents to
ecom@maib.md. The bank verifies that the requirements are met, and if they are,
the company administrator receives and signs the e-commerce contract.
We have shipped MAIB payments with fiscal invoicing on order completion, so the protocol work is done rather than theoretical.
VictoriaBank
Moved to Visa Acceptance Platform, Visa's payment acceptance platform. What matters technically: plugins for the usual e-commerce platforms, card tokenisation, 3-D Secure, and — important if you sell subscriptions — support for recurring payments.
If your model has monthly billing, that is the criterion that decides, not the commission.
MICB
Has an e-commerce offer for merchants and is integrated with MIA. Worth quoting in parallel with the others: terms are negotiated per merchant, and the differences only appear once you have two offers on the table.
PayNet
An aggregator, not a bank. It is the first fintech provider in Moldova with a native Shopify connection, also through Visa Acceptance Platform.
If your shop runs on Shopify, that shortens the integration from weeks to hours. We have shipped a PayNet integration.
MIA Instant Payments
The least known and the most interesting. It is the National Bank's instant payment system, launched in March 2024: transfers between Moldovan accounts using only a phone number.
For an online shop, the National Bank describes integration through a payment link, a QR code or a payment button — and access is requested through your own bank, not from the National Bank directly. The advantage for the customer: no card details entered at all. The advantage for you: it is not a card payment, so it does not carry a card payment's commission.
From 2 March 2026 the system also works between legal entities, with a published fee of 0.7% of the amount, capped at 40 lei per transaction. That is the only commission figure in this article, because it is the only one published officially — everything else is negotiated per merchant, and inventing ranges would not help you.
The international options, and why they are harder than they look
Stripe
Moldova is not a supported country. We checked their official availability page: the European list includes Romania, Bulgaria, Poland and the rest, but not Moldova.
In practice: a company registered in Moldova cannot open a Stripe account. The usual workaround is an entity in a supported country — most often Romania or a US LLC — with a bank account there. That is not a setting, it is a decision about your company structure, with its own accounting costs.
Worth knowing before you build the checkout, not after.
PayPal
More nuanced. PayPal is available in Moldova and you can open a business account, but eligibility is decided case by case and has varied from year to year. The practical limitation: you cannot link a Moldovan bank account — withdrawals go to an associated Visa card.
In April 2025 the Economic Council announced that the government had removed barriers to Moldovan companies accessing Stripe, PayPal and Revolut. The direction is good; check eligibility at the moment you apply, not from an article.
The fiscal receipt: the part discovered too late
This is where projects fail, not at the bank integration.
A card payment without a fiscal receipt is a problem you discover after launch, usually from your accountant. The receipt has to be issued from the same transaction that records the order, otherwise the shop and the tax record drift apart and someone reconciles them by hand at month end.
The route we use is the tax authority's online fiscal service: the order completes, the payment clears, the receipt is issued — all three in one step that either succeeds or fails as a whole.
The alternative — a registered cash register driven from the application — makes sense when one already exists and there is a warehouse where a person handles the goods anyway.
The rule, whichever route: if the payment can succeed while the receipt fails separately, you have built a problem, not an integration.
What the build costs
The floor is around $2,000. That buys a working shop: catalogue, cart, orders, one payment method of your choice, and the fiscal receipt issued on completion.
Each additional payment method costs extra, and how much varies too widely to put a range on it honestly. Not because of the code — that part is similar every time — but because of everything around it: how thick a legal file the provider asks for, how long they take to validate it, whether they have a test environment that works, and whether refunds and recurring charges are in scope. Two providers added to the same shop can differ by a factor, so this one gets quoted per case rather than from a list.
What raises the price above the floor, besides payment methods:
- how much control you want on your side — stock across several locations, roles and permissions, discounts and promotions, integration with accounting or an ERP
- how much design the shop gets — from a clean standard layout to a bespoke one with custom illustration and motion
- recurring payments, if you sell subscriptions — it changes which bank you choose, not just the code
It is a floor, not a quote. The rule is the same as everywhere else on this site: a price given before scope is a guess.
If you want one recommendation
Start with one payment method, pick it by who accepts you fastest, and launch. The second can be added in two weeks at any point, on a shop that is already selling.
The most expensive thing you can do is wait four months for a contract with the "right" bank while the shop sits unlaunched.