Eligible Shopify merchants can now accept USDC through Shopify Payments, thanks to the Commerce Payments Protocol that Shopify and Coinbase built on Base. The stablecoin option appears at checkout alongside other payment methods and runs through the order flow merchants already know.
Across the protocol, Shopify reports net settled payment volume above $42M and more than 448K tracked payments. Gas fees for customers are $0. These numbers, drawn from Shopify and third-party dashboards as of October 2026, are subject to change.
What changes at checkout
Customers pay using a supported crypto wallet, while merchants get local currency on their normal payout schedule. That means an eligible business can accept stablecoins and never hold a crypto balance.
Shoppers also don’t have to keep ETH on hand for network fees. Coinbase Payments executes the transactions and sponsors the gas, and the protocol’s payment steps run on Base infrastructure.
Shopify offers USDC checkout through Shopify Payments, and only eligible merchants in supported countries and regions can use it.
“Shopify worked side by side with Coinbase to build payment infrastructure that could bring stablecoins into everyday commerce,” said Nick Chen, Director of Product at Shopify. “The Base team brought deep expertise so payments can operate at scale onchain, along with a collaborative drive to build something merchants can rely on.”
How the protocol handles an order
Checkout is not the end of a purchase. Items can go out of stock, tax can shift before settlement, and customers cancel or ask for refunds. A basic wallet-to-wallet transfer has no way to deal with those cases.
To cover them, the protocol’s smart contract keeps a buyer’s authorized funds in escrow until the merchant captures the payment. Authorization reserves the money for a specific order, and capture sends it to the merchant. Before capture, an order can be canceled; after capture, it can be refunded.
Once the buyer approves the payment terms, an operator submits the transaction, and the contract blocks the operator from altering those terms. Should an authorization expire before capture, the buyer can take the funds back.
Because the protocol is open source, other commerce platforms and payment providers are free to build on it.