Showing a growing change in how customers opt to pay their e-commerce purchases.
In the recently released Xendit Ecommerce Payments Momentum Report 2026 by payments infrastructure company Xendit, which was produced with ecommerce data firm Cube, it was able to draw an understanding of how the local market decides to pay their online purchases.
The Philippine findings was based on data frim 1,000 Filipino respondents, which is then part of the larger 6,000-person survey of online shoppers across six Southeast Asian markets, and on Xendit’s own transaction data.
The study showed that payments using quick response (QR) code systems suchtad QR Ph and InstaPay grew 198% on Xendit’s platform in the 15 months leading to April 2026—with both platforms now accounting for approximately 13% of e-commerce value in Xendit’s data.
Notably, the Philippines is still a wallet-first market, with fintech giant GCash being dominant. However, e-wallet payments on Xendit’s platform grew just 3% over the same 15-month period.
The shift to QR Ph and InstaPay also aligns as the monetary authority, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, pushes to move more everyday payments onto digital channels.
“Filipino consumers have always been receptive to new technology and we see the same in digital payment, but they don’t all pay the same way. One wants an e-wallet, another scans a QR Ph code, another uses a card,” said Nazim Ali, President of Xendit.
It also noted that this is reflective of a wider regional trend, as in Xendit’s survey of 25 business leaders across Southeast Asia, QR was the payment method most often named as seeing the strongest rise in customer demand (32%), ahead of e-wallets and bank transfers (20% each).
Despite this growing usage of online payment options, cash-on-delivery (COD) still makes up about 23% of Philippine ecommerce value in Xendit’s data—which is the highest of the six markets and is ahead of Vietnam by around 16%, and close to twice that of QR Ph and InstaPay.
33% of Filipino respondents use COD much less than a year ago, but 12% say nothing would make them switch, about twice the level in most other markets.
For those open to paying digitally instead, a discount or cashback is the most common reason to switch.
With this trend, the report expects the Philippines to be the only one of the six markets it covers where COD still accounts for more than a fifth of e-commerce value in 2027.
Beyond payments, it also analyzed why people opt to not proceed with their purchase.
In the past three months, 41% of Filipino shoppers leave when a checkout doesn’t suit them, especially when there is a missing payment option was the main reason they abandoned an online purchase.
The Philippines shares that pattern with Indonesia (51%) and Malaysia (31%). Hence, for merchants in the Philippines, payment coverage should be the first thing to fix at checkout.
“So for a business, going digital isn’t about choosing one main payment method and steering everyone onto it. It’s knowing which methods your digitally savvy customers actually use, offering those, and making sure each one is secure. If people can’t find the option they use, or don’t trust the checkout, they leave,” added Ali.
Although, in neighboring countries like Vietnam (42%) and Thailand (33%), security worries are the top reason instead.
In the Philippines, only 8% of business leaders in the same survey rank fraud among their top two payment concerns today, but 48% expect it to be within five years.
The report underscored that the next five years for Philippine merchants will mean managing three shifts at once: fast growth in real-time payments, a cash habit that is fading more slowly than elsewhere in the region, and fraud moving up business leaders’ list of concerns.
Moreover, the checkouts that hold on to sales will be the ones that offer the full range of ways Filipinos pay, with security built into each of them from the start.
