Bitcoin Forum

Many days go by where I think "Wouldn't it be great if merchant X accepted bitcoin?"  

Even merchants skeptical of bitcoin have little reason to deny their customers the chance to pay with it. Services exist that will take BTC payments from customers and forward the fiat cash ahead.  Besides opening up new avenues of business and being cheaper than credit card charges, the merchants don't have to worry about fluctuating prices or chargebacks!  It's a win-win situation, and sometimes the biggest reason for reluctance is that a merchant simply doesn't have the know-how to go about it.  

Let's make things easy for them.  I'm imagining a kind of scenario where BTC users can flaunt their buying power en-masse.

• Say I find a product online that I'd like to buy.  Something that would be nice to have but I don't necessarily need right away, like a game on Steam.  
• I decide that I want to buy it, but only for bitcoin. Well steam doesn't take bitcoin, so then what?
• I copy the product url and paste it into my web-wallet.  They keep track of my wishlist and the cost of items that I'd like to buy on the net.
• over time as more and more consumers do this, the total amount of money geared towards a particular merchant will continue to grow.  
• Eventually the sum will become too sizeable for a business to ignore.  The web wallet may send Steam a contact essentially saying "Hey Steam, our customers have money, and they want to give you 2.1 million of that money for your stuff.  Why don't we work to make that happen?"
  
• It doesn't even matter if the merchant isn't bitcoin friendly, since they are being offering the USD end of the deal.  You'd have to be pretty thick to ignore it.
  

I'm not saying the above process is explained perfectly, but I'd like to see something like that.  Because sooner or later it would help merchants realize that bitcoin is here to stay.

It's not a bad idea, but it's the kind of thing that bitpay.com or bips.me should be doing themselves. Maybe if bitpay or bips had an affiliate program or some kind of commission structure they'd see these kinds of things happening on their behalf, but right now it's not worth your time.

https://bips.me/certified-partners

Relative in regards to your reply.

Eh? How is that relative?

The biggest problem I see is that 4th party services or affiliates have little incentive to create these kind of wish-list merchant bounties.  I'm glad too, because otherwise it would just create another middle-man in the process of connecting BTC to a merchant.  I agree that the BTC payment gateways should be doing this themselves, they just need to be convinced that it's a valuable investment of their time.  I'd be more than willing to work with someone to flesh this idea out (without compensation), but I lack the web-development expertise to implement it myself.

What you could do is:
Create a website that takes bitcoin "Order Promises" like what you have described. Once the promises reach a reasonable but pre-defined sum (say £1000), then you contact the merchant and explain what they're missing out on and get them to accept the bitcoin orders..
But..
You need to have a pre-determined agreement with bitpay (or another merchant payment provider) to collect all the commission on the "Order Promises" that turn into sales. But even then, with bitpay you'd only be making £9.90 on £1000 worth of "Order Promises".

It's a simple website that could be developed in a few days. It'd cost less than £500 to put a website like that together, but on those numbers you'd need to get over £50,000 worth of "Order Promises" to break even.

I'm not sure you could make it worth your time.

It's tempting, but bitcoin users would have zero incentive or reason to go there.  Even if it was heavily advertised, who wants to navigate to another site just to keep a BTC wishlist?  It's far better implemented within an existing online wallet service, one where you already keep your BTC.


That's the crux.  I wouldn't want to collect any commission from sales.  I think the path from BTC to merchant should be as straightforward as possible.  Convincing BTC payment providers that this is a good idea for them is the best bet I think. It's a way to generate more merchant revenue and a way for customers to derive more functionality out of their site.  The hardest part is simply setting up an interface that keeps track of a customer wishlist and totals up the price.

Become a Certified Partner and integrate merchants to BIPS Bitcoin Payment Gateway ?

What commission or incentive do you pay to your "Certified Partners" for this work?

I worked in the UK signing up small businesses to merchant services for card payments until recently.  The industry standard commissions paid for a new signup ranged from 1-4 btc (£100 - £400).  However the bulk of that commission was earned from the contract to rent the terminal itself rather than from the card processor (although they did pay a long term commission as well). There is quite a lot of competition in this market and it's no longer only the big banks who dominate.  Bitcoin payment processors could definitely emulate this structure through referral schemes although amounts of commissions would be a lot smaller.

I don't see massive incentives for many stores to take bitcoins though, unless trading internationally online, exporting digital or physical goods.  The cost of changing currency on small amounts is pretty high so btc has some advantages there.  I think the current focus for merchants to accept bitcoin should be on industries where the advantages outweigh the current disadvantages (Gambling, exporting, software/digital goods).  If bitcoin doesn't provide any obvious tangible benefits to a business, why would they offer it over existing payment options.  Unless they're crypto enthusiasts, they aren't going to be interested in the hassle of setting up and integrating a whole system to save 0.6% on 1-10 sales a month)

As business use is scaled up, with some btc integration into point of sale software (coupled with low cost tablets) btc can start to appeal to merchants with a cheaper payments solution to sit alongside fiat card payments.  Visa and Mastercard have had contactless near instant transactions for years now, bitcoin needs to have a fast contactless payment solution on phones to compete (although probably with more security than just placing the card near the machine).  While bitcoin suffers on the transaction speed end, for actual payments its much quicker than the usual 3-5 waiting period it takes for card payments to enter into a merchants account after a transaction.  Definitely a selling point of btc as this wait is a very common complaint amongst merchants.

It's on my list to pique Tony/Steve's brain(s) at BitPay pertaining to an affiliate program of sorts.

They did this early on with a thread to pay out X amount of donated BTC for getting an X size business to accept Bitcoin.

I do not feel like searching for it. They paid out I believe.

I think that it will be really difficult to convince big companies like Amazon, Apple, eBay, and so on.

Main problem:
- stolen btc will be used to buy goods online. They will receive thousands of complaints from compromised wallets.