The Problem We Were Actually Solving
I had just joined a small startup that sold SaaS products in emerging markets. Our team was ecstatic to learn that it was finally possible to collect payments online in countries that had previously been shut out of the global economy. However, when we went to implement payment processing, we discovered that our usual suspects – PayPal, Stripe, Gumroad, and Payhip – didn't work. Cue a sleepless week of frantic experimentation with various services, each promising to "solve" the problem of online payments.
What We Tried First (And Why It Failed)
We started by signing up for a slew of payment gateways, each one boasting support for the particular countries that interested us. There was ePayment from First Bank of Nigeria, Payfort from Emirates Bank, and a bunch of others that looked suspiciously like rebranded versions of Stripe or PayPal. Our initial thought was to use these providers and call it a day. But when we started integrating them with our payment flow, we realized that many of these gateways either didn't support our required payment methods (e.g., credit cards, bank transfers) or had woefully underdocumented APIs. The integration nightmares that followed made us question the true meaning of "emerging markets."
The Architecture Decision
After weeks of experimentation, I finally made the call to abandon our "support local payment providers" strategy and deploy a full-fledged cryptocurrency payment gateway. We chose to use CryptoPay, a solution built on top of Bitcoin that allowed users to pay in crypto and subsequently exchange it for our regular currency. The reasoning behind this decision was straightforward: if these emerging markets were willing to brave the regulatory uncertainty and infrastructure hurdles associated with crypto, then so would we. And, honestly, it was an easy way to sidestep the payment processor's constant "country restrictions" that were beginning to drive me insane.
What The Numbers Said After
After a month of crypto-only processing, we noticed some...interesting trends. The conversion rates from our users were atrociously low, hovering around 1-2% from a typical 10-20% with traditional payment methods. This resulted in a significant loss in revenue for us, which we then attempted to make up for by increasing the prices of our products. But the real kicker was that our churn rate skyrocketed – 80% of users abandoned their carts due to the confusion surrounding crypto payments. The crypto payment processing fees were exorbitant, but our main revenue loss stemmed from the lack of trust our customers had in the crypto payment process.
What I Would Do Differently
In retrospect, I would never opt for a crypto payment strategy, especially for an emerging market-focused SaaS. The problem was that we were prioritizing the novelty of using crypto payments over the actual user experience. We should have focused on finding payment providers that had experience handling emerging markets and were willing to adapt their features to fit our use case. For instance, we recently started working with BaaS (Bank-as-a-Service) solutions like Mollie, which has proven far more reliable and user-friendly in our targeted markets.
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