There’s a pretty interesting merchant highlight post put up by San Francisco-based Coinbase today. Specifically, the post focuses on eGifter, an online store that allows internet users to conveniently purchase electronic gift cards to come of their favorite stores (of which include The Home Depot, Sephora, GAP, and many, many more).
Since the company has partnered up with Coinbase, there have been some key results that set bitcoin users apart from traditional buyers:
- On average, bitcoin customer purchased about four times as many eGift cards in a six month period compared to other customers using the service.
- The average order value of a customer paying with bitcoin is about three times greater than other customers’ purchases.
- Customers purchasing with bitcoin are almost twice as likely to purchase an eGift card from a mobile device.
Using the eGifter platform, customers are able to earn a point per dollar spent. One hundred points, in this case, would equal one dollar. In order to encourage the use of this digital currency, eGifter offers a three-point bonus for the folks paying in bitcoin.
On top of that, eGifter is apparently offering an addition 3 percent off for bitcoin customers for a limited time (for a total of about 6% off).
Bitcoin benefits consumers, too
One of the major selling points bitcoin users make is that bitcoin tremendously benefits merchants. Customers can’t file charge-backs, transactions are nearly instant, and fees are paid for by the sender (and they are minute).
Businesses needn’t pay a card processor a whopping 2-3 percent per transaction when using bitcoin, which certainly does make it useful.
But for consumers, benefits haven’t been quite as good. That is, unless, merchants begin follow eGifter’s lead and reward their customers for using bitcoin as a way of saying, “Hey! Thanks for saving me some money on traditional processing fees!”
Except that they just lost Walmart, and I log in 2 minutes ago to see Amazon is also gone. So much for me and eGifter…