It’s not often we received a fully written article on our behalf from a business that used CoinPayments and wanted to share with the world the ease of use and low fees when compared to PayPal. So, we had to share it here for all to see. Have a read below about the first-hand experience Altpocket encountered when setting up and then accepting payments via both CoinPayments and PayPal.
If you’re reading this, you’ll almost certainly have heard of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, what they’re designed for, used and utilized for. But what is it actually like to use cryptocurrency in an online setting? Where huge companies like PayPal and VISA make it increasingly easy for people to use FIAT in paying for things? Well, that’s what we’re going to discuss, from the point of view of a cryptocurrency startup using both CoinPayments and PayPal as a way to raise money in a fundraiser for their service.
As previously mentioned, Altpocket, had a fundraiser in December 2017, allowing users of their platform to pre-purchase the limited version of their ‘Premium’ subscription for a limited time. Altpocket is a socially-oriented cryptocurrency tracker that aims to unite traders under one platform allowing people to manage and track their assets, as well as encourage discussion alongside other traders, while enabling you to follow them so you can see what their portfolio looks like and get tips on what to buy or sell. They set up a fundraising page allowing people to select various packages to choose from, an ‘Early Bird’ rank with 1 month of premium for $9.99, ‘Backer Rank’ for $50 that got you 6 months of premium, or the limited edition $150 package that got you lifetime, which could not be purchased after the fundraiser closed. It was very successful, having raised in total over $63,000 USD in no more than 3 weeks.
Implementing the payment gateways for both are super simple and the process for both PayPal and CoinPayments was streamlined and easy to set up. With CoinPayments, you sign up for an account, then and use one of their many prebuilt plugins and integrations for your ecommerce platform, enter a few details and you’re ready to start accepting crypto payments.
With PayPal, you’ll need to register for a business account, and verify your business accordingly or you are at risk of being limited, which means you’ll have limited access over your account and funds that makes it difficult for smaller businesses or independent people working from home. However, they make it very easy to accept money online, all you need to do is follow a simple step-by-step setup that allows you to select the checkout type and integration you want for your business, and you’re good to go from there.
For Altpocket, we wanted to allow both so users had a selection of using either cryptocurrency or bank / credit card payments through PayPal. Being in the cryptocurrency field, we of course want to support the scene and do our part in adopting it for the masses.
We opened the presale at the start of December and ran it for 3 weeks. In total, we raised over $63,000 USD. 41% of that (~$25,830) amount was successfully done through CoinPayments. The most popular plan was our lifetime package, and BTC dominated throughout, followed by ETH and LTC, XRP, BCH and other smaller coins.
Our lifetime package dominated users choice – getting nearly 80% of all total purchases, with the runner up interestly being the $9.99 1-month package and then our semi-annual option.
I’ve included a detailed breakdown of this usage below:
The remaining 59% was done through PayPal, in various currencies throughout the globe, although the USD, EUR and GBP were among the top ones in use. On top of that, PayPal incur a fairly substantial fee for businesses, up to 5.4%, but averaged at around 4.6% which for us cost over $1700 in total.
CoinPayments however, only take a flat-rate of 0.5% which would be comparatively, a tiny amount – just $125 of the $25,000 we raised through them, a much smaller price to pay for online transactions and one that is much friendlier to small and large businesses alike.
Had we just used CoinPayments in our presale we would have paid just $315 in fees, which would result in savings of over $2500 compared to just using PayPal.
In summary, CoinPayments is an excellent online payment gateway for cryptocurrency, and stands out high and tall above it’s competitors for its ease of use, accessibility in terms of altcoins and merchants, and low fees. Our experience with the service was flawless, from a development, user and customer point of view and we can’t wait to use them again!
