One of the strongest reasons for Bitcoin’s price rise has been its widespread adoption as a means of payment by many online businesses. Even if you continue to hold the Bitcoin as a speculative asset, there is no denying the fact that your ecommerce store will significantly benefit from Bitcoin payments. You do not want to lose out on customers who will be flocking to sites that are taking crypto payments. Since 2017, there are almost 6 million people using crypto wallets for making online payments.
Another reason why you should start accepting Bitcoins for payments is that you do not really need to acquire an in-depth knowhow of Bitcoin workings to join the likes of those who have already been accepting Bitcoins. You can trust many reliable services for transforming your coins into hard cash once payments are received. Bots have been playing a major role in Bitcoin trading and transactions; find out more here.
How to accept Bitcoins as online payments for your ecommerce store:
- When you have an ecommerce site you should look for a reliable BTC payment processor. Most online stores typically have existing integrations and this makes it much simpler to include Bitcoin payments. For instance, ecommerce stores using Magento will already have payment options like Coin Gate or BitPay while Shopify store owners may choose from BitPay, Coinbase, etc to accept Bitcoins.
- You should research the options at hand; for some stores, the processor can be easily found by searching for integrations in the platform’s marketplace. For others you have to go through ecommerce platform documents to learn how to accept Bitcoins. You can contact your ecommerce solutions provider for help.
- Your job is to evaluate the different payment processors to see which is best suited for your business. This means evaluating their transaction fees, payout frequency, currencies that the processor supports, customer support services, and countries where they can work.
- While integrating a payment provider is the simplest way to accept Bitcoins there are some alternative ways too, like payment buttons allowed by some processors. For instance, Coinbase provides a button generator for this purpose.
- You can choose a custom integration option as many providers have API documents which let you do this.
- You can choose to use invoices rather than shopping carts. Processes for making invoices depend on your payment provider; for example, GoCoin lets you use its API for creating invoices. The payment and invoicing methods are decided by the merchant.
- When you cannot accept payments via integrations, invoices, or buttons, you can look for a workaround. For instance, you may request the buyer to contact you directly to buy using Bitcoins. There are no middlemen involved here but you will have to generate Bitcoin addresses for every sale. You will also have to manage invoicing and billing. The best part about this is that there are no processing fees to be paid and this solution is best suited for sites which do not have very high sales volumes.
So, research the options to start taking Bitcoin payments for your online store. While this has been largely overlooked till now, the truth is your sales could get a big boost if you were to start accepting crypto payments.