BuyCard sells gift cards inside Telegram — we built the payment layer
How it started
Earlier this year BuyCard came to us with a plan: move their gift card and eSIM purchase flow into a Telegram Mini App. They had been running buycard.vip for a while — 300+ brands, 150+ countries, solid business. But the payment landscape inside Telegram is nothing like the regular web.
Telegram users have wildly different payment habits. Some only use Stars because it's one tap. Others hold TON in their wallets and expect on-chain payments. And then there's everyone else sitting on USDT, BTC, or ETH who will leave if you don't support their coin.
BuyCard's ask was clear: support all three, and make it feel like a single checkout.
What we built
Three independent payment rails, but from the user's perspective it's just picking an option.
Stars runs through the Telegram Bot Payments API. User places an order, backend generates an invoice, Telegram pops up its native payment confirmation. No wallet connection, no chain confirmation. The fastest path. Works great for small purchases like a $5 Google Play card.
TON wallet uses the TON Connect protocol. User taps TON payment, Tonkeeper opens for transaction confirmation, our listener detects the on-chain transfer, order completes automatically. About 15 seconds from confirm to delivery. Perfect for active TON ecosystem users who are comfortable with wallet operations.
Other cryptocurrencies go through QuantaPay's Checkout Session API. User picks crypto, gets redirected to our hosted payment page, selects chain and token, scans QR or copies address. We support six chains — Ethereum, BSC, Tron, TON, Polygon, Base — and 50+ tokens. On-chain confirmation triggers a webhook back to BuyCard's backend for fulfillment. This is the broadest coverage: USDT, BTC, ETH, BNB, you name it.
Why three payment methods instead of one
Honestly, maintaining three payment flows is a pain. But cutting any one of them means losing an entire user segment.
Telegram Mini App users aren't like traditional e-commerce shoppers — you can't guide them through a funnel. They open your app, see their payment method isn't supported, and close it in two seconds. They won't go buy Stars or install a new wallet just to come back. Every friction point at checkout is pushing people away.
After BuyCard launched the three-in-one payment setup, checkout conversion improved significantly over their web-only store. We can't share exact numbers, but the direction is clear: in Telegram, every additional payment option retains another chunk of users.
Delivery speed matters more than you think
For digital goods, the real experience isn't the payment — it's how fast users get their product after paying. If someone has to wait minutes for a gift card code, the experience falls apart.
BuyCard's backend fires a supplier API call the instant any payment confirmation comes in, regardless of which rail it arrived through. Gift card redemption codes, eSIM QR codes, or top-up confirmations land in the Telegram chat within seconds. Fully automated, no human intervention.
This "pay and receive instantly" experience matters especially inside Telegram, where users are already in a chat interface and any wait feels longer than it is.
Building a Telegram Mini App? We can handle payments
BuyCard is a fairly typical use case: high-frequency small transactions, digital goods, global users. But QuantaPay's payment capabilities aren't limited to this.
We offer a standard Checkout Session API — one endpoint to create payments, webhooks to receive results, a merchant dashboard to monitor everything. Whatever your Mini App sells, you don't need to build the payment layer yourself.
Documentation and integration guides are at quantapay.app.
Want to see the actual experience? Search @BuyCardOffical_bot on Telegram and try it out. More products are also available at buycard.vip.