Bitcoin Forum

Hey everyone,

I was hoping to get some advice from the bitcoin community as I would like to start accepting bitcoin as payment at my business.  I currently own and operate a flip flop company, and since I am active in the bitcoin community it only makes sense for me to offer my coconut sandals out to everyone here to enjoy.

http://www.cocoze.com/

I have read the how-to on the wiki's etc... but it seems as there are a ton of different options.  For a website such as mine does anyone have ideas or suggestions?  I imagine the bitcoin purchases won't be very high at all just thought it would be cool to offer or worst case give me at least a few commission free bitcoins to play around with.

Mods, if this should be somewhere else within the forum please feel free to move it.

Thanks,

What kind of framework are you running on the site now? Depending on what you have gives you different options varying in difficulty. If you answer a few questions and I should be able to help out better.

1. If you are active in the bitcoin community, would you like to have everything done yourself? This includes just accepting bitcoins and either spending them or converting them to fiat on your own through an exchange. This is obviously going to be the cheapest option but also the most work.

2. If you have a supported framework you can always look into a company such as BitPay which can do each part of the processes for you if you would like. They have a number of extensions available: https://bitpay.com/bitcoin-shopping-cart-plugins The downside of this is you will be paying extra fees to the company you use.

Simply accepting payments on a site yourself you need to keep track of a few more things then going through a secondary company. You will need to (ideally) have a number of bitcoin addresses pre-generated in a database where you can pull one address for each payment. Then you have to make sure each address is only used once, the address is only used for that transaction and who/what transaction that payment is for. Keeping track of this stuff isn't that difficult and you can use a combination of other services like http://www.bitping.net/ to let you know when you receive payment or manually/api call to https://blockexplorer.com/ to verify payment was sent.

Easiest steps for accepting payment yourself:
1. Create table in a database with bitcoin receive addresses and expired field
2. When at checkout, pull one address from database and set it expired
3. Add receive address to transaction/order
4. Verify payment (manual/api/etc)

Hmm, I didn't design or build the website so I'll get the details.

To start I just want the bitcoins sent to my offline wallet and I would do as I like with them.  If it did become a large portion of sales I would have to convert some back to fiat and actually use on the business for more inventory etc....

You could take a look at CoinBase :D

http://blog.coinbase.com/post/37274999622/how-to-accept-bitcoin-on-your-website

I believe there was one other provider that did buttons but they chrarge a minimal fee for that.

Ever tried Walletbit or Bitpay yet?

I'd like to recommend this:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=128635.0

He's even done an update just recently.

^ OOoooOoh!

that one's definitely good.

It has bootstrap as its frontend
and is a custom PHP script!

better than a payment processor

It still relies on a 3rd party (blockexplorer) to detect payments. Which is unusably slow at the moment.

Hmm, seems like bitpay might be the way to go here then.