Building a Better Purse Experience

Purse
Purse Blog
Published in
3 min readDec 27, 2016

New Marketplace, New Methods

It’s been an ambitious endeavor creating the world’s largest online marketplace for Bitcoin. But, since our inception, the team at Purse has been committed to building a use case for bitcoin that people not only loved — but one that felt like a utility, an essential asset to their daily lives.

We have grown and matured fast to keep up with the ever evolving bitcoin industry. With over 150,000+ shoppers, and 5,000–10,000+ orders a month, from countries like Venezuela to India — we make the world flatter, stretching bitcoin ecommerce further.

However, scaling a system like Purse is not easy. From creating our own bitcoin wallet infrastructure from the bottom up with bcoin, to constructing a way for individuals to seamlessly liquidate gift card balances in an efficient manner. We’re building value up and down the transactional lifecycle with our unique platform.

A Helping Hand

When building a next generation ecommerce platform for bitcoin, we of course have roadblocks that may deter or distract us from providing our customers the type of shopping experience they’ve come to expect from us.

With a growing user base, comes more potential for fraud. However, since Purse does the majority of its transactions via Amazon, their proprietary systems are great for detecting various types of malicious actors like credit card/identity thieves and hackers that steal users’ Amazon accounts.

SiftScience employs machine learning to assist Purse with identifying fraud globally.

But, they can’t detect all instances of fraud. In order to catch those would-be malicious actors before they cause issues on Purse, we’ve employed the use of machine learning with our partner SiftScience to more adeptly hone in on and remove bad players in our system before they can act. With their help, we can identify those types of individuals with more accuracy, and identify new types of fraud more quickly.

Sometimes fraud can slip by even Amazon, and since transacting in bitcoin is non-reversible, we protect our users’ transactions with our secure escrow, and our own $10,000 Purse Guarantee, every step of the way.

This allows our platform to continue operating as normal, while providing our users a secure shopping experience they’re familiar with as they enjoy spending bitcoin and receiving discounts on their everyday purchases.

Be sure to check out the video above, and our case study we did with our partner SiftScience to learn more.

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