German Shopify merchants selling to US customers pay a 1.5% Shopify Payments FX fee on top of a 0.5% card network cross-border fee, but cannot use a USD-denominated Shopify account because Shopify Germany requires EUR settlement

A German DTC brand selling specialty kitchen tools does 70% of its revenue from US customers via Shopify. Shopify Payments charges a 1.5% foreign transaction fee on every USD sale converted to EUR for settlement, on top of the standard 1.9% + 0.25 EUR processing fee. So what? On $300,000 in annual US revenue, the merchant pays $4,500 in FX fees alone to Shopify, plus approximately $1,500 in card network cross-border assessment fees, totaling $6,000 in pure currency friction. So what? This $6,000 exceeds the merchant's entire annual marketing budget for Google Ads, meaning currency conversion costs are a larger expense line than customer acquisition in some months. So what? The merchant tries to open a Shopify account registered in the US with USD settlement to eliminate the FX fee, but Shopify requires a US business entity, US bank account, and US tax ID, which costs $2,000-$3,000 to set up via a registered agent and imposes ongoing US tax filing obligations. So what? The merchant is stuck choosing between a recurring $6,000/year FX tax or a one-time $2,500 setup cost plus ongoing US compliance overhead that requires an accountant familiar with both German and US tax law, costing another $3,000-$5,000/year. So what? Neither option is economically rational for a business at this scale, so the merchant absorbs the FX fee and passes it to customers through higher prices, making them less competitive against US-based competitors selling identical products with zero FX friction. The problem persists because Shopify Payments is built on Stripe's infrastructure, which settles in the merchant's local currency by default. Shopify does not offer multi-currency settlement accounts (hold USD, settle in USD to a USD account) for non-US merchants. The EU's Payment Services Directive regulates payment processors operating in the EU but does not cap FX markups on merchant processing. Stripe's European entity settles in EUR as required by its EU banking relationships, and adding USD settlement for EU merchants would require Stripe to operate a multi-currency treasury function that is not core to their payment processing business.