Why paying in crypto saves you 5-10%

You pay less here than at a card-only retailer for the same product. The reason has nothing to do with crypto being magic and everything to do with the merchant cost structure of card payments.

The card stack costs the merchant 1.5-3% of every sale

A typical European online retailer accepting Visa / Mastercard pays the issuer about 0.3% (interchange, capped under EU regulation), the scheme about 0.1% (Visa/Mastercard fee), and the acquirer another 0.3-0.5% (Stripe, Adyen, etc.). For business / commercial / premium cards the interchange jumps. American Express adds another 0.5-1.5% on top. PayPal, Klarna and BNPL providers charge meaningfully more — typically 2-4% of the transaction value.

On top of the fees, the merchant carries chargeback risk: the bank can reverse a paid transaction up to 540 days later if the cardholder disputes it, often without the merchant getting the goods back. Reserved float against chargebacks ties up working capital. Fraud-screening tools eat margin too.

Add it all up and the typical card-acceptance load on the merchant is 1.5-3% of every sale. For premium-electronics retail (small basket count, high basket value) it sits at the upper end.

Crypto checkout costs us about 0.1%

We pay our crypto processor a flat fee for generating an address and the network confirmation. No interchange, no scheme fee, no acquirer mark-up. No chargeback risk — a confirmed transaction is final.

The honest version is that we still carry costs the card stack does not: rate-conversion slippage on volatile coins, on-chain fee variance, KYC processing for high-value Orders. Net of those, the saving versus a card stack is real and roughly 2-4% per Order.

We do not pay interchange, scheme, acquirer, chargeback reserves or fraud screening. That is the saving — and most of it goes back into the sticker price.

Why we pass it on instead of keeping it

Because every other premium-electronics retailer is fundamentally selling the same product at the same wholesale price, and "this is the same thing, a few percent cheaper" is the only honest differentiator we have. Card-accepting retailers cannot match the price without taking the loss themselves; they have spent fifteen years building checkout flows around plastic and they are not going to unwind that this year.

The "5-10%" headline is approximate — the saving varies by category and by which payment method you would otherwise have used (card, PayPal, BNPL). For a £1,200 phone paid on a premium card it is the high end. For a £200 accessory paid on a debit card it is the low end. Either way you pay less here, and the saving is bigger on the things that cost more.