Enabling Stablecoin Payments for Last-Mile Cross-Border Shopping

Client Overview

The client is a cross-border e-commerce platform providing end-to-end procurement services for global buyers. Its platform supports product discovery across multiple online marketplaces, proxy purchasing, payment, quality inspection, international logistics, and last-mile delivery.

Operating across more than 40 countries, the platform serves both overseas individual consumers and small to mid-sized business merchants.

Beyond an e-commerce marketplace, the platform is a localized procurement intermediary, helping users navigate language barriers, cross-border payments, and complex logistics workflows.

Business Challenges

As the platform expanded into additional geographies, it encountered payment-related challenges:

• Fragmented payment behavior across markets: Local cards, e-wallets, and virtual cards coexist across regions. In parallel, a growing subset of users and SMB merchants prefer to transact in stablecoins such as USDT and USDC and expect native stablecoin payment options.

• Currency volatility in emerging markets: In regions such as Latin America and Africa, local currencies are often volatile and subject to regulatory controls. Stablecoins are increasingly used to manage pricing certainty, while traditional payment methods offer limited flexibility in these environments.

• Constraints on internal engineering resources: The platform sought to prioritize investment in its core e-commerce experience rather than developing and operating on-chain payment infrastructure (custody, risk management, and reconciliation systems) in-house.

The client aimed to introduce stablecoin payments as a complementary payment method, while maintaining strict requirements for security, reliability, integration efficiency, and operational manageability.

Cobo’s Solution

Cobo integrated its stablecoin payment solution into the platform’s existing order and payment systems, enabling stablecoin payments with minimal architectural change.

• Institutional-grade security and compliance foundation: Cobo implemented institutional-grade custody and on-chain risk controls for the platform. Cobo manages wallet custody, private key security, and on-chain risk controls, eliminating the need for the platform to build and maintain foundational security infrastructure.

• Standardized APIs and streamlined integration: Through Cobo’s Payments APIs, SDKs, and webhooks, the platform was able to extend its existing order and payment systems with a stablecoin payment channel efficiently.

• Payment flows aligned with e-commerce operations: Cobo implemented an order-based payment model in which each customer order maps directly to a corresponding stablecoin payment order, with clearly defined amounts, settlement windows, and standardized exception handling. This structure simplifies reconciliation, monitoring, and operational workflows.

Stablecoin payments were introduced as an additional payment method rather than a re-architecture of its core systems.

Results and Impact

• Broader payment optionality across markets: Following the integration of Cobo’s Payments APIs, users in markets with unstable local currencies or limited payment infrastructure can transact directly in stablecoins. This drove higher payment success rates and improved order conversion.

• Operational complexity controlled: Key functions such as address generation, on-chain monitoring, reconciliation, and selected risk control parameters are handled by Cobo, allowing internal teams to remain focused on core e-commerce operations.

• Stronger security and compliance assurance: Leveraging Cobo’s security and compliance capabilities, the platform enables stablecoin payments while maintaining asset security and regulatory obligations.

• More predictable and cost-efficient operations: Cobo’s Payments API replaces per-transaction gas fee pricing with an all-inclusive pricing model, converting costs that would otherwise scale linearly with transaction volume into a fixed, predictable operating expense. This reduces costs in high-frequency stablecoin payment scenarios.