Testing Litecoin confirmation speed
Can't speak to exact Litecoin times today, but in my experience it's been faster than paying with BTC by a decent margin. Just make sure you're not stuck babysitting the litecoin network fees—they're usually cheap, but the confirmation count requested by the other party matters a lot. If the seller's being sketchy about escrow service safety, walk away, honestly. Also, I wouldn't use Coinbase for anything time-sensitive; better to send straight from a wallet you control. Hope it clears for you quickly!
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Switched from Bitcoin to Litecoin for my last four vendor payments and tracked confirmation times on each. Here is the actual data rather than the theoretical specs.
Litecoin's block time is approximately 2.5 minutes versus Bitcoin's 10 minutes. In practice this means one Litecoin confirmation arrives in roughly the same range as one Bitcoin confirmation would during off-peak hours — but the consistency is different. Litecoin's mempool (the pool of waiting unconfirmed transactions) is rarely congested because the network handles much lower daily transaction volume than Bitcoin. This means my Litecoin payments have confirmed within three to eight minutes in every case, without exception. My Bitcoin payments from the same period ranged from six minutes to 90 minutes depending on network load.
The actual times I recorded
Payment 1: 4 minutes to first confirmation. Payment 2: 6 minutes. Payment 3: 3 minutes. Payment 4: 7 minutes. All four were with a medium-priority fee setting. I did not use high-priority fees for any of these because Litecoin's low congestion makes medium fees sufficient for fast confirmation in all current conditions.
Fee comparison
Litecoin transaction fees are consistently under $0.05 per transaction. Bitcoin fees during the same period ranged from $0.50 to $4.00 depending on network congestion. For a $120 card order, Litecoin fees are negligible. Bitcoin fees are non-trivial, especially if you are sending a precise dollar amount and need to account for the fee on top.
Getting Litecoin
Available on most major exchanges. The BTC-to-LTC swap route through SideShift or FixedFloat adds about 15 minutes and a 0.5% fee. Direct LTC purchase with fiat on Kraken or Coinbase is faster if you have a verified account. Cake Wallet handles Litecoin natively alongside Monero, which is my current setup for both coins.
One real-world note: vendor confirmation of payment using Litecoin tends to come faster than Bitcoin simply because vendors have learned to watch for it. The on-chain confirmation experience you observe also depends partly on the vendor's payment processor — some trigger order processing at zero confirmations while others wait for one or three. Asking the vendor their policy before sending clarifies the actual order start time.