Cryptocurrencies have been used almost entirely for speculation in the past few years and have seen their fair share of ups and downs (mainly down in 2018). There have been attempts, some more successful than others to accept Bitcoin and other coins as online payment but with limited success. It seems that nobody wants to wait for payment confirmation or pay high fees to buy products online. The W3C consortium responsible for developing web standards including payments seems to think that cryptocurrencies and digital assets are here to stay and web standards should support “alternative currencies”.

There are many obstacles for the adoption of cryptocurrencies as a means of payment from transaction time and cost to price stability. Some of those obstacles and constraints are slowly being lifted with the arrival of faster and cheaper networks(Stellar, EOS) and now with the actual integration of crypto payment functionalities in billions of devices from desktops to tablets and cellphones.

In addition, the latest data shows that non-store sales for U.S. retailers’ in September reached $58.063 billion on a seasonally adjusted basis, an 11.4% increase compared with $52.142 billion in the same month of 2017. It seems like a significant opportunity for cryptocurrency holders to finally use coins and tokens from mere speculation to actual product purchases. Will cryptocurrencies ever be used effectively for e-commerce?

Online shopping payment obstacles

According to a study on shopping cart abandonment, U.S. online shoppers are abandoning their carts during the payment phase, and this behavior is occurring on both desktop and mobile platforms. So shoppers are reaching the end of the process but won’t finish checking out. It may not be surprising to online shoppers:

· 46.1% of cart abandonments occur at the payment stage

· 37.4% occur at checkout login

· 35.7% occur once the shoppers see shipping costs

· 20.9% occur when the user needs to enter their billing address

· 20% occur when the user needs to write their shipping or delivery address

Four of the top five reasons for shopping cart abandonment stem from the logistics of entering information through desktop or mobile. E-commerce is a tricky business and selling online is highly competitive, so the last thing you want is for your customer to check out having decided he or she want to buy your product to then get frustrated so much by your checkout process that they walk away.

The W3C Web Payment Group solution

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is the international group that creates standards for the web and one of its groups has been working for years on solutions for web payment. Their mission is actually: “ …To make payments easier and more secure on the web.” In their Goals Statement the following elements can be found:

Improved interoperability between payer and payee systems will offer many benefits:

· A better checkout experience for users, particularly on mobile devices. The standards should facilitate automation, one approach to improving the user experience.

· Streamlined payment flow, which is expected to reduce the percentage of transactions abandoned before completion (“shopping cart abandonment”).

· Easier adoption of payment instrument improvements (e.g., related to security) or new payment instruments.

· Added value through machine-readable digital payment requests and payment responses.

The Web Payment Group had been working for years to simplify web payment working with four major browsers (Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox) and their respective developers to arrive at standards and an API.

Using the parameters and API from the W3C Group the team at Interblockchain has been able to integrate multi cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, Bitcoincash, Ethereum, Stellar and Ripple into millions of desktop browsers around the world. The objectives were to develop a multi cryptocurrency payment solution that is user-friendly, flexible for merchants while using a standardized protocol. This is the very first integration of multiple cryptocurrency payments using the new W3C payment handler API. It is allowing millions of users to pay in tokens and coins on hundreds of millions of desktop computers using the latest version of Google Chrome as their browser. The solution is currently available on Google Chrome browser which represents more than 60% of all browsers used on desktops and is 4x more popular than Safari, its closest competitor.

“The inclusion of cryptocurrencies in Web payment specifications is a critical step in the adoption of digitized assets (coins, tokens, stablecoins) as a means of transacting goods and services. the integration of cryptocurrencies in the payment handler is only the first step in providing innovative solutions with digitized assets through Interblockchain’s technologies…”. Didier Martin CEO of Interblockchain.”

How does Interblockchain’s Payment Solution work

This is the first integration of the payment handler API using actual cryptocurrencies to pay for products directly from an online store. It is also the first integration offering a Merchant Transaction reporting tool to track sales. The payment application allows users to go through a few simple steps at checkout and effectively pay with a choice of multiple cryptocurrencies supported by the merchant. There is minimal information to enter (if you have not already used GooglePay in the past) such as your name, address, phone number, and contact information. The API saves that information to the browser for secure payment the next time.