Coinbase Commerce Alternatives in 2026: Where to Move, and What Happens to the Money You Left Behind

Coinbase Commerce is not shutting down. It is shut. The merchant portal has been permanently inaccessible since March 31, 2026, and there were no extensions. The old commerce.coinbase.com address drops visitors on the Coinbase Business page, the Commerce API no longer answers, and the withdrawal tool is switched off. Plenty of merchants found out about Coinbase Commerce closing when their checkout stopped working.

There is a successor, and if your company is registered outside the United States or Singapore, it is not open to you. Coinbase's product page says today: "Coinbase Business is currently available in the US and Singapore, with plans to expand to more markets." The transition page promised expansion "to additional countries throughout 2026." Five months on, the list is still those two countries. So you are choosing a new provider, and the only open questions are which one and in what order you evaluate them.

That order matters more than the shortlist. Commerce quietly did four separate jobs at once, and no single replacement does all four.

What Coinbase replaced it with

Coinbase publishes its own side-by-side comparison of the two products, and it is worth opening: the Coinbase Commerce transition page is where every quote below comes from. Four rows.

• Who can sign up. Commerce: "Open globally, no KYB" — anyone, anywhere, no business verification. Business: the US and Singapore.
• Who holds the money. Commerce: self-custodial, keys with the merchant. Business: custodial only.
• What you can accept. Commerce: hundreds of assets. The transition page still reads "USDC only today. USDT coming soon" — that line is out of date. Coinbase Business now takes both USDC and USDT, with USDT converted to USDC when it lands.
• What it costs. Commerce: 1%. Business: 1%. Coinbase states 1% on completed payment link transactions. The rest of the price list, and the rate on the automatic USDC-to-dollars conversion, are visible from inside the account.

So be precise about what the successor got wrong for you. On assets and on price it is fine. It fails on exactly two things: availability and custody — and availability is the one that ends the conversation. If you want to watch for the day that changes, the country line lives on the Coinbase Business product page.

Two details carry over into the rest of your work. Commerce settled on Ethereum, Polygon and Base — remember the three, they matter when you go looking for old money. And your records did not travel: Coinbase's FAQ says flatly that Commerce and Coinbase Business are separate systems, and history does not transfer.

What you are actually replacing

Open signup with no KYB. KYB is know-your-business, the corporate twin of the identity check a bank runs on a person. Commerce asked for none of it, which is why it became the default for merchants in countries nobody else would touch. Every live provider now runs some version of it. What each one asks for varies, CoinGate is the one here that publishes its onboarding requirements up front, and everywhere else you see the list when you apply.

Geography, though, is checkable in advance for part of the market. CoinGate publishes a supported-countries page with an invitation to ask if yours is missing. BitPay publishes an article on the jurisdictions it supports and blocks. For providers without a list it is one email. Industry is the harder half: high-risk categories rarely appear in any published list, and BitPay's own pricing page notes higher fees for high-risk industries without saying which industries or how much.

Self-custody. Here is what custodial looks like on the day it goes wrong. Your money sits in the provider's account between the customer paying and you withdrawing. If the balance is held for a compliance review, or a payout is delayed, you have no key to move it with — you have a support ticket. Self-custody hands you the opposite risk, and every Commerce merchant is living inside it right now: nobody can freeze your funds, and nobody can help you find them either.

There is a reliable tell for which one you are being offered. A provider that publishes a withdrawal price list and a settlement schedule is holding your balance until you ask for it.

Hundreds of assets. Almost nobody needs hundreds. Pull six months of actual payments and look at what customers really sent; for most merchants it is a stablecoin plus one or two majors. This is the easiest of the four to over-buy.

The 1%. Still on the table from more than one provider in the list below. The price Commerce merchants stayed for did not disappear with the portal.

The eight providers, and what each one publishes

Listed from the most published to the least, because that is the axis you can actually verify before signing anything.

CryptumPay — 1% per successful payment, from 0.5% at higher volume, and the fee can be passed on to the customer. Incoming payments are converted to USDT on arrival. Withdrawal is available at any time with no minimum, to whatever destination address the merchant specifies. Connection comes in three shapes: payment links, a CDN checkout widget, or the API with webhooks on order status change. Suits a merchant who wants the balance in a stablecoin from the moment it lands and no floor under withdrawals.

CoinGate — 1% per transaction on the Standard plan, no monthly fee. It is the only one here publishing the full withdrawal set: rail, percentage, minimum and schedule. Withdrawals — money you pull out to your own bank or wallet — are free on crypto and on SEPA, both with a €50 minimum withdrawal amount. SWIFT costs 0.50% of the amount with a minimum fee of €50, which is the opposite of the line above it: a €2,000 SWIFT withdrawal costs €50, not €10. Settlement runs weekly. So moving €1,000 into a euro bank account over SEPA costs nothing beyond the 1% already taken at payment. CoinGate holds your balance, and it publishes its country list. Suits a merchant who wants bank money on terms readable before signing.

BitPay — 2% plus 25¢ below $500,000 in monthly volume, 1.5% plus 25¢ from $500,000 to $999,999, and 1% plus 25¢ from $1M, recalculated on cumulative monthly volume. Watch the fixed 25¢: on a $75 order the headline 2% is really 2.33%, and on a $10 order it is 4.5%. BitPay publishes daily fiat settlement straight to a bank account in AUD, CAD, EUR, GBP, MXN, NZD and USD — the currencies and the frequency, but not the fee, the minimum or the rail. It also publishes its jurisdictions. Suits larger average orders and volume near the tier lines.

NOWPayments — 1% for payments without exchange, and 1.5% for multi-currency payments, fixed-rate payments and those where the customer covers the fee. Network fees sit on top. It is the only one of the eight publishing a minimum payment amount: roughly $2 on some coins and $3–5 on others, depending on the currency pair, with a public API method that returns the number for your pair. Suits small tickets, because you can check the floor before you build.

Plisio — 0.5% on the Gateway API, 1.5% on White Label, the wallet free. The price is attached to which product you integrate, so pick the product before you compare the number. Suits a team that will write the integration.

Cryptomus — 2% for new merchants, with the vendor inviting you to get in touch for as low as 0.4%, priced on business type, volume and integration. The published tariff is 2%; 0.4% is the floor a negotiation can reach. Suits volume you can demonstrate in a conversation.

Binance Pay — the number the vendor actually publishes applies to Mini Program merchants, meaning storefronts running inside the Binance app: 1% per transaction, plus a $1,000 minimum monthly fee when the previous quarter's volume came in under $90,000. Binance Payouts costs 0.80% per transaction, capped at $5. If you have seen 0% quoted for merchants, it is not on the vendor's fee page — the zero there covers transfers between Binance Pay wallets. Suits selling to Binance's own users.

CoinPayments — publishes no acceptance percentage at all. Custodial wallet services come from PaidInSatoshi Inc. and Centauri Pay LLC, so those entities are the ones holding your money. Fiat settlement, card payments and settlement timing run through third-party partners and are "subject to jurisdictional restrictions", which means how you get paid out depends on where you are. Price, settlement and timing all arrive in a conversation.

Three gaps run across the set. Full fiat withdrawal terms come from CoinGate alone; BitPay gives you the currency and the schedule but not the price; the other six give neither. A published minimum payment amount comes from NOWPayments alone, which matters if your average order is small. And custody, the property you are told below to decide on second, is stated on exactly one of the eight pricing pages: CoinPayments. The tell resolves a couple more. For six of the eight, published material cannot answer it — ask, and get it in writing.

The order to choose in

The usual comparison starts with the fee. For a Coinbase Commerce migration that order is backwards, because the gap between these percentages is a fraction of what one wrong answer to the questions above them costs.

1. Will they take you at all? Country, legal entity, industry. Part of this is a two-minute check: open CoinGate's supported countries and BitPay's jurisdictions article, and send one email to the providers without a list. Industry is the half that stays quiet, so ask about your category directly and get the answer in writing. When your country sits in a grey zone, applying to two providers in parallel is still the fastest route.

2. Who holds the money until you withdraw it? Self-custodial, as Commerce was, or custodial, as most of this market is. Use the tell: a published withdrawal price list and a settlement schedule mean the provider holds your balance. Settle this before you look at features, because it is the one property you cannot renegotiate later.

3. How does the money reach a bank account? One provider publishes the whole answer. For the rest, get the rail, the percentage, the minimum and the schedule in writing before you integrate. CoinGate's SWIFT line is the reason: 0.50% reads cheap until the €50 minimum fee lands on a small withdrawal and turns it into 2.5%. If the destination is fiat in a company account, the mechanics of getting crypto to a bank account are where the real cost usually hides.

4. How do you connect? This decides what the move costs you in engineering days, and there are three honest sizes.

If Commerce was a payment link in an invoice email, a replacement link takes an afternoon. Start from payment links and QR invoices and skip the integration entirely.

If Commerce was wired into your order logic, you are rebuilding charge creation, status handling and webhook verification. Walk the integration checklist for a payment API while you still have a choice of provider.

Between the two sits the checkout widget: a script on the page plus a callback your front end has to handle, with a fixed order amount created from your server. Small print bites here — CryptumPay's widget needs your domain added to the project first, or it will not load.

5. Then the fee. By now you have two or three providers that will take you, on the custody model you want, with settlement terms you have read. Compare them on your real average order: a fixed cent charge on top of a percentage is what turns 2% into 2.33%. The full arithmetic of rate against network fees against conversion against withdrawal is a separate piece — how to choose a processor on total cost.

The money still sitting in your old Commerce wallet

Your funds did not go anywhere. Commerce wallets were self-custodial. The 12-word seed phrase was yours. Coinbase never held it and cannot recover the funds for you — which is exactly why those funds are still on-chain where they always were. What was switched off on March 31, 2026 is the tool that collected them. Coinbase's own wording: funds "will become inaccessible via Coinbase." Via Coinbase.

Why the balance comes back empty when you import the seed. Commerce generated a new receiving address for every single payment it took. In Coinbase's words, your funds "may be spread across hundreds or thousands of addresses." Then the restore itself works against you. A wallet rebuilding accounts from a seed phrase keeps going only while it keeps finding a non-zero ETH balance on Ethereum Mainnet, and the first account that comes back with zero ETH ends the search. If your money is USDC sitting on Base, account one looks empty and the wallet stops right there. You type in twelve words, see nothing at all, and conclude the funds were confiscated. Nothing was taken. The wallet stopped looking at the first account.

If you also took Bitcoin, a second mechanism piles on top. Wallets give up after 20 unused addresses in a row — the gap limit written into BIP-44, the derivation standard most of them follow — and Bitcoin sits on its own derivation branch, so it has to be searched separately from anything EVM.

What to actually do about it.

1. Restore the seed into MetaMask and add accounts by hand. It derives them from the phrase in order, and adding them one at a time is what walks you past the empty account that stopped the automatic search.
2. Derive the address list once. Ethereum, Polygon and Base share the same coin type, so the addresses are identical on all three and only the balances differ; check each address against all three networks. With hundreds of them, generate the list with an offline tool on a machine with no network connection — a seed phrase typed into a web page has stopped being a secret.
3. For Bitcoin, use Electrum and raise the gap limit above 20. That is a console command inside the wallet, not a switch in the settings screen.
4. Sort what you find by balance before you move anything.

What it costs, and where to stop. Every address holding funds has to be swept in its own transaction, and every transaction pays a network fee. Hundreds of addresses means hundreds of fees. There is therefore a balance below which the tail is simply not worth moving, and that line sits in a completely different place on each network: an Ethereum transfer can run to a few dollars, while the same sweep on Polygon or Base costs a fraction of a cent. Take the large addresses first and decide the cut-off with the current network fee in front of you.

Bitcoin-era balances are the hard case. Coinbase's own language is that for many merchants, especially those with Bitcoin, funds "may become practically inaccessible." Take that seriously before you budget a week to the problem.

Where the line sits on outside help. Paying an engineer to sit with you through this is a normal engagement — they change a setting and read a screen. The boundary never moves: the seed phrase goes into wallet software you chose and installed on a machine you control, and nowhere else. Anyone who asks you to type it into their page, paste it into a chat or hand it over "for recovery" is stealing from you, and the withdrawal tool is gone, so no official form exists to type it into either. For transition and access problems Coinbase names commerce-transition@coinbase.com; whether it still answers is not something to promise.

The short version

• Coinbase Commerce shutting down is past tense. The portal, the API and the withdrawal tool went dark on March 31, 2026, and the Coinbase Commerce shutdown came with no extensions.
• Coinbase Business is available in the US and Singapore, with plans to expand. It takes USDC and USDT, and it states 1% on completed payment link transactions; the rest of the price list sits inside the account. Your Commerce history did not come with it.
• The successor is fine on assets and price. It fails on availability and custody, and availability is what disqualifies it for most of the world.
• Choose in this order: will they onboard you, who holds the money, how it reaches a bank, how you connect — and only then the fee.
• Country lists are public at CoinGate and BitPay, so check those before you apply. Everywhere else it is an email, and industry restrictions are never on the page.
• The money in your old Commerce wallet is still on-chain and your seed phrase still controls it. A standard restore stops at the first account with no ETH on it, which is why you see nothing. Derive the full address list, check it on Ethereum, Polygon and Base, sweep the biggest addresses first, and let the dust go when the network fee exceeds it.

Rates and vendor quotes above were checked on August 21, 2026. The Coinbase Commerce alternatives here are compared on what each one published that day, so open the provider's own pricing page before you sign anything.