Almost one peso in every four that Filipinos spend shopping online is still handed over in cash when the parcel arrives. The Xendit Ecommerce Payments Momentum Report 2026 puts cash on delivery (COD) at about 23% of Philippine e-commerce value — the highest share among the six Southeast Asian markets it studied — even as QR Ph and InstaPay payments on Xendit's platform nearly tripled in 16 months, Newsbytes.PH reported on October 17.
For shoppers, the report explains why the payment screen on Shopee or Lazada looks the way it does. For sellers, it carries a sharper warning: 41% of Filipinos who abandoned an online purchase in the past three months said it was because their preferred payment method was not offered.
Why Filipinos still pay cash at the door
Xendit, a payments infrastructure company that processes transactions for online businesses, produced the report with e-commerce intelligence firm Cube. It combines Xendit's own transaction data with a survey of 6,000 online shoppers across six Southeast Asian markets, including 1,000 in the Philippines, according to GMA News. Because the figures blend Xendit's survey and platform data, the shares can differ from other industry trackers.
Within that data, the Philippines is the region's last cash stronghold. Vietnam, the next most cash-reliant market, has COD at around 16% of e-commerce value. The habit is fading here too — 33% of Filipino respondents said they use COD much less than they did a year ago — but a hard core remains: 12% said nothing would convince them to switch, roughly twice the share of holdouts in most other markets surveyed. Xendit expects the Philippines to still be the only market where COD exceeds 20% of e-commerce value in 2027.
QR Ph and InstaPay are the fastest climbers
The money moving away from cash is not going where you might expect. Payments made through QR Ph (the national QR code standard) and InstaPay (the central bank-supervised real-time transfer rail) grew 198% on Xendit's platform between January 2025 and April 2026 — nearly tripling — and now account for about 13% of the Philippine e-commerce value the company records.
E-wallet payments on the platform, by contrast, grew just 3% over the same period, per Newsbytes.PH. That does not mean wallets are small: the report still describes GCash as the dominant digital payment method in the country, as Fintech News Singapore notes. It means wallet use has matured, while bank-to-bank QR payments are where the growth now is.
The checkout mistake that costs sellers sales
The 41% abandonment figure is the report's most practical number for anyone selling online. A missing payment option was also the top reason for abandoned purchases in Indonesia (51%), Vietnam (42%), Thailand (33%), and Malaysia (31%).
Xendit president Nazim Ali, in a statement quoted by GMA News, said the job for businesses is "knowing which methods your digitally savvy customers actually use, offering those, and making sure each one is secure." Shoppers who "can't find the option they use, or don't trust the checkout, they leave," he said.
By Xendit's numbers, the safe play for a Philippine seller is addition, not substitution: keep COD for the 12% who will not budge, and add QR Ph and InstaPay, where volume is tripling. Discounts and cashback at checkout were the most-cited incentives across the region for nudging COD users toward digital payment. If you are setting up as an online seller, note that the tax side has its own checklist — see our guide to BIR registration for online sellers.
Fraud worries are arriving with the growth
Only 8% of Philippine business leaders currently rank fraud among their top two payment concerns, but 48% expect it to become a major concern within five years, per the GMA News report. Shoppers have reason to share the worry: a separate study found 84% of Filipino adults encountered scam attempts in the past year, with fraud losses shifting toward e-wallets.
A ₱25-trillion region by 2031
The stakes behind these habits are large. Southeast Asia's online market reached US$197 billion in 2025 (around ₱12.4 trillion) and is projected to approach US$400 billion (around ₱25 trillion) by 2031, according to the report. Regionally, COD has already collapsed from about half of e-commerce transactions in 2019 to under a third today, and Xendit expects it to fall below 25% of regional e-commerce value in 2027 — everywhere, that is, except the Philippines, where cash at the door still has a few years left.
