Online businesses are going to thrive and bring huge adoption to Internet Computer Protocol once they realize that it's there. To me, online businesses currently have some of the biggest potential gains to get from moving their websites and databases onto Internet Computer Protocol, because right now the existing infrastructure is stacked heavily against you as an online business. I've been an online business owner since 2011, so I've felt this firsthand.
If you're using third party tools like third party websites, you can be instantly banned for no reason, and there are many barricades based on the geography you're in as to whether you can even sign up. Putting all these different tools together as an online business without Internet Computer Protocol is very difficult: getting your website up, getting traffic to your website, then actually making sales, taking payments, and delivering a product. It all generally requires a lot of knowledge and experience. It's trial and error. Internet Computer Protocol has made all of this so much easier, and I believe online businesses are going to start realizing this and building their websites and their platforms on Internet Computer more and more, because there are so many areas where the existing system makes it difficult for you as an online business.
Payments are the first place I feel the pain
One of the biggest areas I think of first is payments. As someone who takes payments for my online business, here's what happens: if you schedule a call on jerrybanfield.com, I get scraped for around 4% of whatever payment you make. And if you're paying in a different currency, I get scraped again converting that currency over to U.S. dollars. Then I'm subject to chargebacks and refunds.
Now, for me personally, with my one-on-one calls, this isn't a big deal, because I charge $300 for a call right now and I very rarely have refunds to give back. But I still get scraped on a fee, and more if it's an international payment besides U.S. dollars. There is always the possibility of a refund or a chargeback, which can be really annoying.
For my business personally, I take payments in crypto on ICP, and it's so much better, because there are no refunds and no chargebacks. It's complete. Once I've got the money, the customer can't do anything except ask nicely to please refund it or give it back. For online businesses, that is a huge deal.
And the payment fees — while 4% is not so bad, there are credit card providers in many places around the world where the fee could be much, much higher to convert your local currency to U.S. dollars. You might have to pay $400 or $500 worth of your local currency to convert it and actually send a payment to me on PayPal or Stripe. Then there are many countries where you can't even use some of these things like PayPal or Stripe. People don't even have bank accounts. So for many online businesses right now, using the existing payment tools like Stripe and PayPal blocks a ton of their potential customers, and makes the refunds and chargebacks brutal — especially if you're selling something.
If you've got an online store, the refunds and chargebacks can be brutal. While I'm just giving my time, and I value my time very highly, I'm not actually sending or selling a physical product and then depending on a profit margin. So if you've got an online business where you're selling a physical product, your profit margin might only be 50% or less, and then you get charged back — even if it's only 10% of the time — and you're getting stuck with all these 4%-plus payment fees. That can make your business pretty much unsustainable, on top of then paying web hosting costs and trying to get traffic. This is the same kind of squeeze I talk about in why I think the existing crypto exchanges are threatened by ICP.
Hosting your website nearly for free
Internet Computer Protocol for online businesses is absolutely amazing, because you can put your website up nearly for free. It can get a good amount of traffic with hardly any cost, depending on how you set your website up. Obviously, if you put a lot of data — gigabytes of data on your website and serve that up, with videos and all kinds of products — that could cost more. But hosting your website for many businesses is the part I see people overpaying for. I see businesses that don't know how to make their own website paying ridiculous amounts of money, hundreds of dollars a month, to host a simple website that they could put on ICP practically for free. All they'd need to do is pay someone to get it set up, and it would just stay there indefinitely with no more payments. I go deep into this in why I think ICP and Claude Code is the best web hosting setup online.
Then online businesses get access to this global audience. As Internet Computer Protocol gets more and more adoption, there will be more and more people who not just have ICP, but who can pay you on ICP in all kinds of coins — Chain-key Bitcoin, Ethereum. There will be stablecoins soon, ICP, all these other tokens, and they're immediately settled directly to your account, without any chargebacks.
One all-in-one platform instead of a dozen tools
Right now, if you're a business owner, you have to plug all this different stuff in. There are some all-in-one solutions, but they're often expensive and limited in functionality. I've tried almost all of them. ICP is the first all-in-one platform where you can put your website, take payments, host your data, and deliver your services. If it's virtual and you're selling online classes, you can put your website, your payments, and deliver your classes all on one single platform. And you can't easily have that be censored or taken down either, which is great. There are some use cases where that will be more important for some people than others.
But the simplicity that Internet Computer Protocol gives for online businesses, and the cost savings — the bigger your business gets, the more you may have to worry about security issues. Can somebody hack into my website and steal my credentials and get all my customer data? You can easily keep all of that secure on Internet Computer Protocol. When you combine that with the payments, and with onboarding everything on chain so that your business is much more sustainable, it's obvious to me that once online businesses start onboarding, Internet Computer Protocol is going to suck huge amounts of online businesses onto it, because it's so much better than anything else out there.
Why I think the transition will be a hybrid model for now
I've considered doing my payments only in Internet Computer Protocol for my business, but there's definitely a transition phase, because there are still lots of people who don't have crypto — especially people watching my videos who want to talk to me about non-crypto subjects. But the more Internet Computer Protocol gets mass adoption through all these different use cases, once someone has an Internet Identity wallet, then having them as your customer for your business is so much easier.
So for now, and for the foreseeable future, it's going to be much more of a hybrid model, with businesses just moving websites onto Internet Computer like I've done, and taking payments. I take payments in any crypto, as well as any crypto that's on Coinbase. And there are going to be more and more apps that make it easier and easier to take payments and set websites up directly on Internet Computer Protocol. If you want to follow along with how this is developing, I keep these conversations going in my ICP Crypto playlist.
The apps and marketplaces being built on ICP
There are even going to be applications that get built — we're seeing some now — where there are virtual goods marketplaces, and people are going to build all the same kinds of tools that exist outside Internet Computer Protocol. Things like online course hosting frameworks, or build-your-own-eBay. Developers are going to build all of these as NFTs that can be sold, or build them as platforms where you can pay to use them. Then you'll be able to have a one-time payment in some cases, or in others it'll be a subscription. We've already seen tools like Caffeine AI build me a website in one prompt, and that's just the beginning.
It's going to get easier and easier to put your online business on Internet Computer Protocol. And because the payments are all directly integrated through crypto, all these older business solutions — web hosting, course hosting — are either going to have to integrate Internet Computer Protocol as well going forward, or they're going to lose their customers, because the technology is superior. It's so much better for the online business that, as soon as online businesses know this is an option, I think they're going to start exploring it and building there and setting up like I have on ICP, where my website is cheaper, more secure, and more scalable than any other web host. Just that alone is enough to bring people on board. So this is a great time, as I'm filming this, to be in on ICP. This is something I haven't heard anybody talk about before.
Launching your own token to fund your business
The final element I'll put out here for online businesses: one of the big challenges of starting an online business is having a business idea that needs more support and more funding. You already can launch your own token on ICP to raise funds for that. Now, while many of these investments are not going to work out and the business isn't going to succeed, what we're going to see is all kinds of online businesses successfully raising funds on ICP, essentially replacing the traditional businesses — an online version, an ICP version, of eBay.
There'll be developers who want to build something like the equivalent of WordPress, so that anybody can put their own website on ICP with no coding. We've seen some of those in the past, but nobody's fundraised a whole token for the economy yet. We're going to keep seeing more and more applications that successfully fundraise and really are able to build nice tool sets on ICP. And because the tech is so superior, because for an online business the whole setup is so far superior to everything else you're using, I think Internet Computer Protocol in just a few years is going to be an absolutely thriving system for online businesses.
This is especially true when you can integrate something like an Open Chat community, or there are tools building where you could actually do everything all on the same infrastructure. In theory, you could even build your own email client to send emails, or your own messaging tool, or bring in something like Open Chat. Right now you have to bring all these different components in. You've got customer service going on in Discord, email, these Zendesk platforms. Online businesses are often a mess right now of different services all trying to kind of put together one solution. And generally the simplest, cheapest, most secure all-in-one platforms tend to win. If you've got that kind of technology and simplicity that cuts out the need to use all this other stuff, this is going to win. This is exactly the kind of thing I love talking through with people one-on-one inside the Jerry Banfield Family.
I'm an early adopter, and I'm curious how this ages
So I'm an early adopter on this, as I've been an early adopter on so many other things — like having a business online in 2011. There were plenty of online businesses when I started up, but the number has increased exponentially since then. So I'm interested to see how this video ages. In 10 years, I imagine there's going to be a ton of online businesses on ICP. It's going to look super obvious, and everyone's going to be starting their business on ICP, launching a token, and having their own communities.
It's going to make a whole different kind of consumer environment. As a consumer, our current online business system allows you to just throw your money around and spend carelessly, and then just get a refund if you bought something that turns out you didn't need. The business system on ICP will encourage more thoughtful spending, more consideration, and more trust for businesses, which ultimately is going to make better deals for consumers. So I'm really excited for this future. If you want to chat with me and see my online business, go to jerrybanfield.com and see what I've got set up there.