The Bitcoins are Coming! The Bitcoins are Coming! Part 2

Tiffany WhiteNo CommentsSelling Online

In part one of our four-part series, we explained how we got involved with Bitcoin and how we got organized—as in, how we narrowed down our search of all the thousands of articles out there about Bitcoin so that it would benefit our company and clients most.

Today, we’ll talk about what it takes to accept Bitcoin as a merchant, as well as the vendors we researched and decided to go with… and why.

We’re a Business and Want To Accept Bitcoin

Now that we generally understood Bitcoin, next we needed to learn how to accept Bitcoin for payment. It turns out, accepting Bitcoin is a little bit like accepting credit cards, but minus all of the complex fees and (of course) charge backs.

Upon searching, the standout vendors were Coinbase and BitPay. The Coinbase solution offered both the merchant processing side and the wallet or “pay side” of the equation, which we liked. (We’ll discuss how to pay with Bitcoin in part three of our series.)

However, we personally felt BitPay was more focused on merchant processing, so we chose them. The deciding factors were:

  • Ease of use for clients
  • Access to quality support
  • Thorough documentation
  • Clear and affordable pricing
  • Dedication to processing transactions

In a nutshell, accepting Bitcoin payments with BitPay works as follows:

  • The buyer chooses to pay with Bitcoin
  • The BitPay interface allows payment from any digital wallet
  • The transaction is approved and the buyer receives confirmation
  • The buyer can download the purchased product
  • The seller receives payout in fiat currency or Bitcoin

So not only is the process of accepting Bitcoin and being paid as a seller extremely easy with BitPay, the fees are reasonable too. BitPay’s Starter Plan does not charge a monthly fee; however, it does charge a 1% transaction fee. Their other plans charge a monthly fee, but no transaction fees. While the Starter Plan is intended for low transaction volume customers, the paid plans are nice when the seller knows his or her transaction volume, allowing control over the processing costs.

We are now fully certified and integrated with BitPay. To use this payment method with Content Shelf, all that is needed is a Content Shelf Account, BitPay Account, and the API Key from the BitPay User Dashboard.

Tune in soon for The Bitcoins are Coming! Part 3, where we’ll talk about our experience with how to pay a vendor using Bitcoin.