What is eCommerce?

eCommerce is an activity of electronically buying and selling goods via websites and mobile apps. It covers business-to-customer, business-to-business, customer-to-customer, or customer-to-business transactions.

There are 2,14B online shoppers worldwide and every year more people are getting involved in online shopping. At the same time, the conversion rate is quite low after all only 2,17% of visits convert into purchases so e-commerce business has the opportunity to grow and convert more and more visitors into buyers.

Digital and mobile wallets, such as PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay, accounted for almost 45 percent of global e-commerce transactions which means that the days of “accepting only major credit cards” are over.

What are cryptocurrencies?

Cryptocurrencies are digital currencies that work through a blockchain that serves as a public transaction database.

The crypto market cap is $884+B and more than 300M people own cryptos, they are potential e-commerce customers due to crypto implementations that some well-known brands have provided.

Paypal Check Out with crypto

Paypal launched Check Out with crypto which allows US users to purchase goods and services for their cryptos (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, or Bitcoin Cash). The cryptos convert into fiat USD without extra fees for both customer and business. For retail companies, there are no additional integrations required.

To use this feature users need to establish their PayPal Cryptocurrency Hub to buy, sell, transfer and spend cryptos.

How it works in two steps:

First, crypto assets will be sold for fiat in the amount of cart total at the moment crypto assets will be selected as a funding source.

Second, the amount delivered into fiat will be used to fund the purchase. And that’s all.

Paypal Check Out with crypto is simple to use and doesn’t require additional activities for business but the number of cryptos is limited and doesn’t cover even top-10 cryptocurrencies in terms of market cap. This solution seems to be not for any crypto user.

Coinbase Commerce

Coinbase Commerce helps online platforms to get payment in cryptocurrencies in a shape of a self-managed product and provides businesses with analysis. The tool supports 10 popular cryptos such as Bitcoin, Ethereum USD Coin, USDT, ApeCoin, BitcoinCash, DAI, Dogecoin, Litecoin, Shiba Inu and works worldwide.

Coinbase has built plugins for major eCommerce platforms such as Shopify and WooCommerce.

For customers, the feature provides payments via Coinbase wallet or any other crypto wallet that supports the cryptocurrencies mentioned above.

All payments facilitated by Coinbase Commerce are fully decentralized and peer-to-peer. No one has accept to these funds but merchants.

CoinGate

CoinGate is a cryptocurrency payment processor that allows to collect payments, send billing invoices, convert payouts to fiat currency or keep the cryptocurrency via plugins and libraries.

Businesses can convert accepted crypto into fiat and settle one cryptocurrency to another. The tool supports 70+ cryptos among which there are Polkadot, BUSD, Aave, Tron, Solana, Cardano, Decentraland, Uniswap and others.

The merchant’s funds are kept in cold storage which seems to be the safest solution.

As for customers, they need to choose CoinGate as a payment method while shopping and choose a cryptocurrency for pay.

Advantages and disadvantages

All these solutions have common benefits for customers and businesses:

• quick transactions that help business to streamline cash flow and promise customers fast delivery and as a result increase demand
• increasing customer traffic due to market expansion
• increased security due to blockchain technology in use
• lower fees for sellers
• data transparency
• better UX because of additional payment methods that increases the conversion rate of a website.

At the same time, customers are not protected. The solutions provide only tool for payment but don’t guarantee the reliability of sellers. And of course, price volatility is a problem for both customers and sellers while purchasing power of an asset can change in one hour and sellers need to have a tool to convert volatile assets into more stable coins or fiat money.

IvendPay, a solution for offline and online retailers

There’s one more solution that provides online and offline businesses with the possibility to accept payments in 30 cryptocurrencies.

For eCommerce the project offers API that can be easily integrated with the seller’s website. IvendPay values customers’ safety so its team works only with trustful sellers.

The system is open to accepting new cryptocurrencies and supplying their holders with the chance to spend cryptos. So there is no need for users to be holders of the top assets to purchase everyday goods and services.

It’s a safe solution for both customers and businesses as all transactions are encrypted and data is stored on a blockchain. Customers can easily, seamlessly and quickly buy goods worldwide without the need for local fiat conversations.

Sellers can increase their conversion rate and reduce the number of abandoned carts as different cryptos are acceptable for payment.

Crypto payment is a win-win solution that leads eCommerce to the next level and develops user experience.