Bitcoin Forum

Hi, I run a couple of online shops and manage a few others for clients - they all use WooCommerce running on Wordpress and are fairly small. They all make 1 or 2 sales a day, so not major traffic, although transaction values are quite high as they sell high value items.

What would be the easiest way for me to integrate Bitcoin payment into these businesses? I have seen various services such as BitPay but don't know if any of them are recommended over any others. In some ways it seems like these guys act as a "middle man" which kind of defeats some of the benefits of using Bitcoin, if you ask me - is there a simple way to set it up without having to use such a service? (A plugin or something similar which simply works out the currency conversion and then connects to my wallet).

Any ideas or help appreciated.

If the transaction volume is so low, why not setup a wallet address to send the coins to and an alert for any movements to that wallet?

You only need to be willing to accept bitcoins instead of fiat this way (or send to exchange and auto trade to fiat) and you need a simple convertor tool with the exchange rates you will be using for the payment.

Ive paid using bitpay and it worked as it should, couldnt comment on the others.

simplist way if the business is thinking of just storing the bitcoin (not converting to fiat)
is create a single address and make it into a QR code image.

easiest way go to: blockchain.info/address/your address
on the right is the QR code.. right click image, save image as..


then using a few lines of code you can get a price.

googling "bitcoin price api"

gives you
https://bitcoinaverage.com/api
http://www.coindesk.com/api/
https://bitcoincharts.com/about/markets-api/
https://blockchain.info/api/exchange_rates_api

if you want a bit more professionalism then bitpay can help
https://bitpay.com/integrations/woocommerce

Bitpay is one of the most popular so i would go with them if i were you.

There are some others like GoCoin or the other one "coinify" which are similar

But better try to search in google for "bitcoin payment processor"

I just use purse.io. Great website, but it only delivers to America. The site gives you a discount just for paying in bitcoin.

Yeah. Bitpay is probably your best option for integrating bitcoin into your online stores. Also, what items do you sell on the site?

Could you link us your store? I'm bored and want to spend my money. Is it physical or digital goods you sell?  I'm highly interested if it's some kind of digital good.

I know, bitpay is basically turning bitcoin into another PayPal, do why don't you use the blockchain.info API?

Join Coinbase. Are mainly a web wallet (with to many security measures) and lately even even a very successful exchange. They have an impeccable service for merchants. I am not an expert in such kind of things but know that to many of those collaborate with it (are more than 41 000 businesses work with them). I cannot tell if is the best choice for your case but I can tell for sure that it is worth to give a luck yourself and to evaluate using your eyes and your mind if it is good for you.

There are some outdated wordpress plugins in the store but I don't recommend them as they might not work properly and mostly will lead to other problems so your best bet would be to hire someone here to code you a bitcoin payment plugin on wordpress for scratch.

BitPay is easy and works well. It gets you out of managing a wallet because you never really handle the bitcoin side of it.

BitPay is ruining the purpose of Bitcoin. It has a 1% fee, so like someone else mentioned, it is turning into some kind of Paypal. First approach would be putting a QR code at the end of purchase of a single wallet, and then they tell you what is their Wallet address, so you can verify it. After you know more, you can make a specific wallet for each customer.

Agree, if volume is low and in small online shop it is low, you can even manually accept bitcoin transactions.

my friend used bitpay for his online shop its virtual things btw and it runned 24 hours, but for his clothing line he just handle them manually due to the volume is low

1 - Use Bitpay and pay 1% fee(overkill)
2 - Make the customers have to contact you before the purchase so you can tell the price(problem will be if price rises or falls too much between contact and answer).
3- Make a custom script to create a fair BTC price and charge it in BTC in the shop card

If you are quite new to blockchain and bitcoin transaction you have no other choice than using bitpay like services. I think there is also one plugin to accept bitcoin payment available for wordpress theme, search it.

None of us bitcoiners like to pay fees, however the price is right for retailers. Consider that a credit card would charge your business 3% and take days to clear. With bitpay the dollars are in your bank account that night and you are never exposed to price volitility.
You could retain 100% of the customers money by managing your own wallet, but there are security and volitility concerns that will require knowledge of the protocol. It may be worth 1%.

There are various plugins available for accepting bitcoins on wordpress/woocommerce, search it on google.  ;)

I personally used Coinbase in combination with Woocomerce and Wordpress. The integration was pretty easy. You just need to register an account on coinbase.com and put the APi key into the plugin.

https://de.wordpress.org/plugins/tags/bitcoin

Paste a QR-Code (receipt bitcoin address) on the shop, it's all.
proceed manually the command ... like a regular wire payment for example.

https://www.bitaddress.org

you could set up a watch only address at blockchain.info and they then notify you when a payment has been made.

A restaurant near me does just that. At the register they have a QR code taped to the counter. Bitcoin users just scan that QR and send. The wait staff then check the balance to confirm the Tx. Then the waitress holds out her phone for a tip! kinda cool an very simple.   

If I had a small business as a physical shop, I would simply go to bitadress.org, generate a new paper wallet, and print the public key in a paper, put it in the counter and that's about it. I wouldn't even bother dealing with 3rd party payment processors. The more you stay true to Bitcoin only the better unless you really need to.

I would like to accept bitcoins as bitcoins also but this is just not a nice smooth process for buyer or seller.  Whats also a potential problem is that people send less than the amount they should, then you have emails back and forth.  Not good for high volume.

This may work for bitcoin savvy individuals and business owners, but not so much for those who just want to provide their customers with another payment method. These people wants cash, and so it's logical they'd use a 3rd party service.

That is what I would do also. However let me offer a defense of payment processors.
I have talked to a lot of businesses about BTC and they often have the same concerns. One realistic concern is price volitility. For a business the money never stops flowing in and out. They need most of each sale to cover fixed costs and new stock. It would be disastrous to get a lot of business in bitcoin then watch half of it go away in a crash. Many businesses can't weather that uncertainty.  
There is also the problem of managing a wallet. This is all so new, and with money on the line it can be scary to amass bitcoin. Someone at the business would need to know how to safely collect, store, and cash out bitcoin. It may make more sense for a place to farm out the bitcoin processing for low fees. My guess is that the future will see a diversity of systems from "roll-your-own" to "never-touch-bitcoin" processing.  

If you are already using WooCommerce you can skip the middleman like Bitpay and accept bitcoin direct to your wallet using the CoinSimple (https://bitcoinnewsmagazine.com/coinsimple-lets-your-store-accept-bitcoin-to-trezor-wallet/) free plugin.

that good idea,to add bitcoin for payment option on you online shop,i really apreciate and i wish i can do something like you.
i think you should contact one of many bitcoin payment processors,like bitpay,neteller or gocoin,and i think if you talk about what you need to them,they will giv you answer and way to make bitcoin as your payment option. wish you luck :)

We can't say what is best or better way for the small online shops to accept Bitcoins because its solely depends upon the owners of the online shop that how much they know about Bitcoins and its benefits.