While the emergence of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in the past decade has opened up a potential alternative to traditional payment platforms, it looks like this trend will not manage to catch on in the e-commerce sector.

This is according to a report from SearchNode which found that four out of five online retailers see cryptocurrencies as being irrelevant to their operations, or at best not being especially helpful.

There are benefits to using cryptocurrencies from a security perspective, since as the name suggests they rely on very sophisticated forms of encryption and thus are very difficult to compromise, making it possible to carry out safe shopping online more consistently.

However, the volatility of this type of currency and the obstacles involved in integrating the ability to accept cryptos at the checkout of an average online shop have proven to be too taxing to make adoption worthwhile on the retailers’ end. Meanwhile, they have not been adopted by mainstream consumers, meaning that companies would only be catering to a tiny niche market.

The lack of uptake of cryptocurrencies amongst average consumers does not seem likely to change any time soon, so while there was a period of time when they were heralded as the next big thing in online retail, that dream seems to very much have vanished.

That is not to say that the way that people pay for online purchases has stagnated; indeed, the rise of mobile payments has initiated a significant change in this respect. There have also been growing debates around how to improve the protection afforded to customers who make online purchases, such as through the introduction of multifactor authentication and the use of biometric information to check the identity of shoppers before they reach the checkout.