News

May 2018 Feedback Summary and Comments

We are a small team at Coincards, but we are growing rapidly in order volume and the number of Canadians we get to help every day. Last week we asked our customers to provide us with some feedback so that we could make sure that our team’s best efforts are focused on moving in the right direction.

We received an overwhelming response rate, with 94.3% of responses being positive, but we really would like to hit 100% or as close to it as possible.

Order fulfillment is, of course, our main function and our #1 priority. Coincards is investing heavily in the coming months to making the ordering process as seamless as possible and we are very excited for the things we have planned.

In response to your feedback, we would like to present to you the “State of Coincards” report/post to let everyone know where we are at and where we will be focusing efforts.

Physical Cards Processing Times:

By far, the biggest concerns we heard were the turn around times for our selection of physical cards. Typically, all orders for physical cards are shipped within 5-10 business days of ordering, however, we realize that this can mean up to two weeks to ship and possibly another 2 weeks to arrive in the mail.

We are working hard with our partners to reduce the shipping wait time down substantially. We have been developing a plan that will hopefully allow for all physical cards to be shipped from our office within 24 hours of processing, however, this is still in the very early stages. In the meantime, we are making a commitment to increase our stock levels and hopefully reduce the shipping times on our most popular cards down to 5 business days or less.

We will also take steps to better communicate the transit times for physical cards until we are able to put our solutions in place.

Electronic Gift Card Processing Times:

Some users also addressed concerns over processing times of electronic gift cards. We are also making efforts to improve in this area.

Just yesterday, we implemented changes to our processing system that reduces the required number of confirmations from 6, down to only 2. This allows for a faster average processing time of 40 minutes on Bitcoin transactions and brings Litecoin/Dogecoin transactions to merely minutes before being processed.

Further to this, we are building a new backend system which will allow some of our most popular cards to see automatic processing without staff intervention. This should bring down transaction times even further!

Altcoins:

We receive a lot of requests for the adoption of various altcoins. While in an ideal world, we would like to be able to service the entire cryptocurrency community, it simply is not possible. Many different challenges are present in accepting each altcoin including development costs, storage options, liquidity on markets, which markets to use, and volatility.

In late December we adopted a new payment processing software, BTCPay Server, which allowed us to become our own payment processor and has given us the ability to focus on our core business while maintaining our ethos around crypto and holding our own private keys. BTCPay server currently supports BTC, Lightning, LTC, and Doge so we have chosen to adopt these coins as well.

We were also the main advocate for having easy altcoin payments built into BTCpay with Shapeshift, allowing those coins which we do not accept directly to be converted for BTC, LTC or Doge.

At this time we are looking into supporting Ethereum directly as soon as it is been adopted into BTCpay server. We do not have any plans to accept any further coins as we find the challenges to be too much at this time.

Coins which are frequently requested:

  • Ethereum
  • Bitcoin Cash
  • Dash
  • Verge
  • Litecoin (We already accept Litecoin)

Convenience Fee:

A small number of clients had requested in the feedback that our convenience fees either be lowered or eliminated altogether. Unfortunately, our convenience fee is already at the lowest possible point for us to be able to provide the service we do.

Coincards.ca does not make any additional profits from the gift card distributors. We do not take additional profits on the “Spread” and use a neutral bitcoin price as indicated by the average on global markets. Our profits are simply a flat 5% on all orders, which is very low for the industry standard.

We are working with many of our suppliers to employ strategies that will allow us to hopefully reduce the fee level however it simply is not something we can do at this time.

Ultimately, our goal as a service is to eliminate all fees and create the best value for Canadians. We hope to achieve this by the end of 2018.

Prepaid Credit Cards (Visa/Mastercard):

Prepaid Visa and Mastercards are among our most requested item. Unfortunately, due to Canadian regulations, we are not able to offer these cards.

Other notes:

  • Coincards.ca offers free stickers available for order here: https://coincards.com/ca/product/coincards-ca-sticker/
  • Live support is available at most times between 9am – 3pm PST, Monday to Friday.
  • Coincards.ca cannot provide the ability to load a “wallet” or hold a balance on our site due to Canadian regulations.
  • We are looking into password requirements as some users mentioned they were a bit “too secure”.