Confirmation Policy and What It Costs in Abandoned Checkouts
Waiting for more confirmations is safer and loses sales. Where the tiers should sit.
A confirmation policy trades one cost against another. Setting it as a single number gets one of them wrong.
The two costs
Accepting too early: the small risk that a broadcast transaction is replaced before confirming.
Waiting too long: abandonment during the wait, and support contacts from customers who have paid and see nothing.
Why a flat policy fails
Six confirmations on a small order is roughly an hour of waiting for an amount nobody would attack. The risk avoided is negligible and the abandonment is not. The figures below assume a provider that itemises, and a provider that lets a business accept Bitcoin payments is one.
Zero confirmations on a large order is exposed, particularly for instantly delivered goods where the attacker receives the product before any replacement is visible.
The tiers that work
Small amounts: accept at broadcast, using replacement signalling detection and fee adequacy assessment.
Ordinary amounts: one confirmation, roughly ten minutes.
Large amounts: three to six confirmations.
The thresholds depend on your product value and margin. The structure is what matters.
Who carries the zero-confirmation risk
Some providers absorb it below a stated threshold, using their own analysis.
That is a real part of the service and worth asking about, because it determines whether a tiered policy costs you anything at all. At company scale the cost structure changes, and Collect & Exchange prices it accordingly.
Instant delivery specifically
Instant fulfilment plus zero confirmation acceptance is where exploitation concentrates.
For anything delivered immediately, require at least one confirmation regardless of amount. The abandonment cost is lower than the fraud cost in that combination.
The copy that matters more than the policy
Telling the customer what the wait is for and roughly how long.
Measured, this has a larger effect on completion than adjusting the confirmation threshold, because most abandonment during the wait is confusion rather than impatience.
The setting people forget
The payment window length, which is separate from the confirmation policy.
A window shorter than typical confirmation time produces routine expiries. Twenty to thirty minutes for a slow network, shorter for a fast one. To check any figure above against a real provider, a regulated crypto exchange publishes the equivalent terms.
The measurement
Completion rate by asset and by amount band, over a quarter.
That tells you where your own tiers should sit, which is not where a general recommendation would put them.
Fees move with network demand. Any figure here reflects the date shown above and should be re-checked before you act on it. Where a measurement was taken by hand, the article says so.