Bitcoin Forum

Hi, I'm new to the forum and am waiting to be upgraded from newbie status so I figured I'd try to start a discussion...

My hot sauce company has just started accepting Bitcoin as a payment method (no BTC sales yet unfortunately). Any other merchants out there that can share their experience accepting Bitcoins in a non-Bitcoin (non-tech) related industry? Has it worked out well? Has it helped with marketing? Any tips? Thanks!

The rapid fluctuations in the price of BTC make it difficult for retail operations such as yourself.  One way to think about it is to ask yourself: are you willing to go to sleep each night with your revenue in BTC?  How would you react to waking up and being down 10%, 20%, 50%?  Would you be able to implement a stop loss system to minimize your losses?  Would you cash out at the end of each day to minimize losses?

I'm also posting to find out what your hot sauce company is.  I'd love to buy some.  Could you compare it to something I may be familiar with?

Yes, a link to your sauce company would be awesome.

I found it.  Throw his sig into Google.

HOT HOT HOT - The Original Hot Sauce Superstore Since 1994

They sell all kinds of hot sauce, not one particular kind.

BTCh'n Salsa :P

http://btchnsalsa.webs.com/ :)

Andy B

I think many who accept bitcoin are using things like Coinbase where the money can be quickly converted to USD so they don't need to worry about the BTC price dropping.

I've actually debated buying PSN cards for people in other areas of the world using bitcoin as an exchange medium, but it's a bit on the risky side.

Bitcoins are dangerous to accept now because of how much the price fluctuates. However, I believe if more and more retailers were to accept it the price would become more stable. The best thing you can do right now is implement a system that sells all your bitcoins if they drop a certain amount, say 10%

Agree, with one exception.  If he's looking to invest in BTC, selling his hot sauce for BTC is one way to go about it.  In fact, he could implement a system where it would stop offering BTC as a payment method once he's reached his monthly BTC investment goal.

You can check out in our catalog. Quite a few merchants accepting bitcoin without being related to the industry.

I use a merchant account with BitPay so I can either keep the bitcoins or have them instantly exchanged and a deposit in USD made to my bank account. Otherwise you are absolutely correct and it would be a huge risk.

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Yes, a link to your sauce company would be awesome.
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Thanks for the interest. It's: www.hothothot.com

We sell many different established brands, we do not make our own sauce.

If you have any other questions regarding my business/site in particular i'd be happy to answer them.

Yes, I've actually seen your catalog before...I was mainly interested in talking to/networking with these merchants on the forum.

How can I get in the catalog? Is there a cost?

BTCUMP

There is a free pdf on our website. You can also buy the printed edition.
If you need a catalog for promotional purpose, we can send you one for free, just PM me.

I think that by using bitcoins in almost every bussiness would eventually stabilize the bitcoin market as it's value would be invested in more stuff. 

Right, as an "investor" in Bitcoin. I'd like to see more people use them in commerce. That's the only way it will ever be accepted. I need to start practicing what I preach. But with the Gox/Dwolla situation, it will be hard to get more BTC in the short term...unless anyone wants to trade BTC for hot sauce!!

Is it really that risky? 
Keep an app open that tells you when the price drops more than 6%...  there is one called Bitcoin Paranoid.

There are service providers that solely operate to mitigate this risk. BitPay is the one that I use which is probably the biggest. They will take any BTC purchase and either transfer it to your wallet or instantly exchange it to you local currency and deposit in your bank account. Fee is .99% which is way better than PayPal or a credit card processor.

Thats awesome Kudos to your hot sauce company :D

yep

Do you like sleep?  I like sleep.

There's a company called Gyft that's offering gift cards to anything in exchange for Bitcoins.

I'm not quite sure how often the market fluctuates 6-10% or whatever the risk op is comfortable with, so surely that could be a problem.  Would be easy to transfer at the end of the day and not accept btc orders except during business hours.  (Local time, or whatever they feel comfortable working.)  Odd model for online business, I agree.. but still reasonable.

I'm sure there is a thread somewhere that could be pointed to that would have all the best options stated, anyone?

Plenty here at www.coingig.com (http://www.coingig.com).

We even got someone selling this http://coingig.com/kochac/530 (http://coingig.com/kochac/530)   :)

neat idea. cool site

hey man i didn't see Bacon Hot Sauce on your site!!!

http://www.baconhotsauce.com/

Hot sauce lovers unite.

www.bitpay.com

Well, there are a TON of hot sauces out there, but we are definitely going to expand our selection!!! Thanks for taking a look!

Awesome, cool! Thanks!

Thanks for the encouragement everyone. If you want to order you can use the coupon code I just created for the forum...

Coupon Code: BITTALK10

For 10% off! www.hothothot.com

If you like hot sauce, check out our marketplace post: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=206670.0

If you still cannot post outside the newbie forum, please ask any questions or give any comments/feedback here. I'll be happy to respond!

As a merchant that accepts (even prefers) bitcoin payment.  It does have risk, but the time cost averaging tends to work out nicely.
We sell the New Liberty Dollar silver pieces and do not take credit cards or paypal, only non-reversible transactions such as Bitcoin or bank deposit.

This allows us to keep our costs lower than any others that do the same thing, so if you are looking to expand your silver collection, or to pick up pieces useful for in person commerce, you can find us at NewLibertyDollar.com.

We will likely do a piece specifically to honor Bitcoin in the near future.  At the Bitcoin Conference last weekend in San Jose there was a lot of folks clamoring for them, so our designers have been hard at work ever since.  They have some interesting ideas that we are looking forward to seeing realized.

Speaking of which, if any of you have ideas that you would like to see in a physical silver piece celebrating the bitcoin development, send me an IM or suggestion through the website which will go to the developers directly.

So how many hot sauce bitcoin transactions have you seen so far?

Going to be backing bitcoin with silver and gold.
Simply by selling silver and gold pieces for bitcoin.

Doing my little bit for the community.

When the new pieces will be available they will be under http://bitColdHardCash.com

Cool sites here.

There are two big obstacles to widespread use:

1. Trust as it applies to online transactions.

2. Speed as it applies to small face-to-face retail transactions.

If there is ever enough financial incentive for a few large trusted online retailers like Amazon to accept Bitcoins the first obstacle could be overcome.   Reloadable smart cards would encourage face-to-face retail transactions if they can be completed in much less than a minute.  Of course people would have to understand:  lose your card, lose your money; just like hard cash. 

The big advantage is anonymity. GPS, cameras everywhere, credit card trails; Big Brother isn't coming, he is here.  Of course most people don't care until they are the target and then it is too late. 

Ok, Iknow what to do now :)

Bitpay is nice, and they already offer POS Bitcoin payments (with an iPad). But I'm wondering about the speed, is it really usable? Maybe they use another system for POS as what they use for web payments?

I'm saying this because I did a web payment recently where the merchant was using Bitpay. The payment was only confirmed after the block with my transaction was calculated and included in the block chain. This means it took several minutes to confirm my payment. On the other hand, I paid for the new Humble Indie Bundle yesterday, and they use https://coinbase.com/‎ as a Bitcoin payment processor. There, my payment was confirmed in only a few seconds. That's the speed you need for POS payments.

But on the Coinbase web site I don't find anything about POS systems, they only do web payments...

We've only had a handful of Bitcoin orders so far in the 2 weeks it's been available as an option. There was a bit of a hiccup at first, but we fixed the bug and I've tested it since...it works great now. Very easy process with BitPay. I'm hoping more people order with Bitcoin because it is far and away THE easiest and cheapest payment method from our side. Transaction costs are a fraction of what credit cards charge.

I found it.  Throw his sig into Google.

I quickly looked into coinbase, has anyone had any other experiences with it...either buying from a merchant using it or using it as a merchant?

I'm interested in it, but I know that BitPay is the market leader and very trusted. And they got a big VC investment recently which hopefully will fix any of the delays you mention.