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Xendit, the payments infrastructure company, today released the Xendit Ecommerce Payments Momentum Report 2026, produced with ecommerce data firm Cube. The Philippine findings draw on 1,000 Filipino respondents, part of a 6,000-person survey of online shoppers across six Southeast Asian markets, and on Xendit’s own transaction data.
Payments over QR Ph and InstaPay, the country’s real-time QR and bank transfer rails, grew 198% on Xendit’s platform in the 15 months to April 2026. Filipino shoppers are also quick to leave when a checkout doesn’t suit them: 41% say a missing payment option was the main reason they abandoned an online purchase in the past three months, their most common checkout frustration.
“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. “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.”
QR Ph and InstaPay are growing fastest, from a smaller base
QR Ph and InstaPay now account for about 13% of e-commerce value in Xendit’s data. The Philippines is still a wallet-first market, with GCash dominant, but e-wallet payments on Xendit’s platform grew just 3% over the same 15 months. The shift to QR Ph and InstaPay comes as the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas pushes to move more everyday payments onto digital channels.
This reflects a wider regional trend. 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).
Cash-on-delivery is losing ground more slowly than elsewhere
Cash-on-delivery (COD) still makes up about 23% of Philippine ecommerce value in Xendit’s data, the highest of the six markets, ahead of Vietnam (around 16%), and close to twice that of QR Ph and InstaPay. A third of Filipino respondents (33%) use it 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, as it is across the region. 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.
A missing payment option is the top reason Filipinos abandon checkout
Of Filipino shoppers who dropped an online purchase in the past three months, 41% said the main reason was that their preferred payment method wasn’t offered. The Philippines shares that pattern with Indonesia (51%) and Malaysia (31%). In Vietnam (42%) and Thailand (33%), security worries are the top reason instead. For merchants in the Philippines, that makes payment coverage the first thing to fix at checkout.
Fraud is a small worry now, but not for long
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.
For Philippine merchants, the next few years 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. 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.
The full report is available here.
