In the previous week I made multiple transactions between 1 sat/byte and 5 sat/byte. This is between 2 and 10 cent per transaction. Indeed for 1 dollar transactions this is between 2 and 10% and thus relatively expensive, especially when considering that the fees were higher before.

However, my reaction was on the fact that you use it for commerce without mentioning the extremely small amount of 1 dollar. If I think commerce I think about payments between 10 and 500 USD and there is BTC perfectly suited for at the moment.

Even BCH has fees of a few cent sometimes, so than you are still paying a few percent in fees. Lightning Network is maturing slowly, I expect that you can use it without risk or failure soon if it isn't the case already (I use it without problems). This might be the perfect solution for your use case. Even on a dollar you won't even remark the fee, and your node can function to connect all your peers very well.