Bitcoin Forum

Hi,

to all people interested in selling stuff for bitcoin (at least in the US)
I recommend watching the bitcoin show episode 30 in which the new merchant accepting/checkout service www.bit-pay.com is presented extensively.

It is so usable like nothing seen in the btc-world so far!

make sure to check out the site, too - they have a nice video.


BTW: I don't have anything to do with them and I don't even live on the same continent BUT I really think this could help bitcoin!

Agreed.

Agreed - they have built a great product!  Stephen and Tony are great guys to work with.

- Keyur

Just signed up for it today.

This looks like the bitcoin solution to PayPal.

Now every website that sells stuff should be able to easily sell using bitcoin.

I cannot wait to give it a try.

I am surprised that they needed my company EIN though.

Well, not quite every site:
currently only businesses in the US...LIKE ALWAYS - hint, hint Keyur ;)

...but still!

And I wrote them an email and already got a response - they hope to be able to expand to Europe, too very soon.

Thanks guys!  I was about to post a thread but I'll just add to this one.

We need to walk before we run here.  Bit-pay is still in beta-test, and we can't support hundreds of merchants tomorrow.  Since every install has a little customization we want to make sure every merchant gets our full support to get going.

Too many bitcoin startups have grown too fast beyond what they can support.  And when a problem happens, suddenly thousands of people cannot get their emails answered!  We don't want that to happen.  We'd rather grow a little more slowly and make sure we can support every merchant we take on.  We're in this for the long haul.

Believe me, we would LOVE to open bit-pay up to every business in the world, and we will get there.  We just ask that you are patient with us, as every week we will add new features to our site that will enable us to bring on more merchants. 

We do have the Merchant Application at our site, and anyone interested should apply now.  If we feel we can meet your needs with what we have, we'll approve you sooner.  If it's a more complicated install, it may take more time.  Please be patient and we look forward to serving you!

Thanks
Tony

Can anyone update the list of "Shopping Carts" on the wiki and add Bit-Pay?  I can't see how to do that.

Your website is a bit slim on the details (no sound here, so I have not watched the video.  I tend not to watch video.  You may find that developers tend to not watch video, we like to read.)

I have a website that sells stuff.  I use PayPal shopping cart.  Can I do a similar thing with Bit Pay?  The PayPal shopping cart is dead simple to implement.

alternately:

I am transitioning my site to Wordpress.  Is there a Wordpress plugin for Bit Pay?

Thanks!

Bruce did it step by step on the bitcoin show today and it looked hella easy.  Just like paypal but with alot more cool features.

More with the video.  ::)  Am I the last devotee of the written word?  ;D

I'll check it out.

I watched the video and they are a liiiiiiiiiiiiittle too liberal on the "Eliminates fraud" jargon.

It doesn't eliminate fraud, it eliminates the buyer being able to "renig" on his transaction. A fraudster can still pay with stolen bitcoins.

@bit-pay

You might want to look into changing your logo. Paypal isn't a nice business and may sue you.

EDIT: Just watched the video, your service sounds great.

??? I don't see the similarities you see. Why would paypal sue bit-pay?

Thanks.  We have a designer working on a new logo.  In fact we had a little beauty contest last night with lots of color options. 

an HOUR!  Seriously?  This is why I read.  Give me a transcript of that show and I'll read it in 10 minutes or less.

Look, Bit Pay.  Give me written documentation, or I (and other developers) wont use you.  It's that simple.

[edit - I implemented PayPals shopping cart in an hour. I'm not watching an hour long video ]

sigh. then don't. the economy will probably survive without bitkamikaze using bit-pay.

BTW you don't need to watch the show. it is so easy that you will understand it on the fly anyway if you have created your own sites.

I'm not the Kamikaze developer OR the King Of The Mountain developer, I'm just a degenerate gambler.  ;D

But, I am a developer for the past 13 years, and I can speak for developers when I say we want written documentation, BEFORE we register, or we're not going to use you.

And the Bit Pay site does not have this, or at least does not have it where I can easily find it.

If you DO have it, put it out front!  If you don't have it, get it.  Trust me, this is important.  Example code.  Test beds.  "real" merchant APIs have this.

I've added a boilerplate page to the wiki and linked it to the "Shopping Carts" category. I didn't take the time to fill out any of the content. I might squeeze in some basic info before I go to bed.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bit-pay

I think it's a bunch of fucking bullshit and a rip off of the bitcoin community.
Isn't it already a bunch of crap that we pay 3& to credit card companies. They claim to charge that for their "highly protective, massively fraudulent services that use thousands of computers and office buildings thousands of employees etc etc etc.

So why are we expected to pay these guys 2% of every transaction to use this service as a merchant?
What did they do, besides write a simple program, which should give them 2% off all merchants fees? What do they do that qualifies this HUGE EXORBITANT FEE from these guys? I don't get it. I call this a bunch of baloney

I hope another one comes along next month and moves these guys down 2 notches.

Haha if you don't like the service don't use it, but 2% is hardly unreasonable.  If it is so easy, then make a competitor and charge whatever you want.

bitrebel, noone makes you use the service, or does someone hold a gun to your head and says you must or else?
they can charge whatever they want, this is a free market after all.  their fee could make or break them depending on quality of service and demand. plus their fee leaves enough room for new competition. business 101. if it's not profitable for them they have no reason to run it and develop it further. try doing something like that yourself.

do you complain that apple charges $500-600 for their iphones/ipad produced with cheap labor in china, or that luxury cars cost premium?  ftw?! go complain about ebay taking 10% of a sale lol

I already complain about all that other shit, yes, so it's due and just. I can complain all I want to. That's part of what makes this country great.

I think whatever amount you get paid for whatever that you do for work you are being overpaid because someone somewhere else makes much less doing similar job  - don't you find this comment stupid? that's how yours sounded, no offence.  

why do you care how much someone else is charging, they are not forcing you to use it and not ripping you off. you may think they ripping others off, but if others find their service useful and great they can justify the cost.  additionally if bitpay going to do payouts in USD, they need a buffer on exchange rate.


and btw you clearly have no idea what it takes to develop a service and to work on new features & support. - it costs money and then it needs to be profitable.

Dude, they are a start-up, they need to pay off their initial costs, streamline their offerings, and above all turn in a profit. I don't know bit-pay's fee structure, but if they make it easy for merchants to start using Bitcoins by providing a great service, it's good for everyone. Also, from what I've heard on these forums the credit card companies basically make money every time there is fraud by charging merchants out the ass, so they aren't using their percentages primarily for that purpose. There's no reason competition can't fix the fee "problem" as usage goes up. From what I remember they offer Bitcoin directly to cash equivalent conversions, so those definitely have real costs that need to be covered. Some form of fee seems reasonable at this point and if merchants are willing to pay, that's their prerogative.

Maybe i'm being a little harsh on them, but they are ripping off the bitcoin community, plain and straight.
I'm not a programmer, but I have had dozens of websites in the past, and I happen to know for a fact that what they are doing is SIMPLE. Plain and SIMPLE. It's a great service they are providing, but they are taking ZERO risk, and they are doing VERY LITTLE to warrant a 2% merchant fee. I, for one, will absolutely not use them.

if you don't agree with their fee structure, don't use them. simple as that.   who the f#$k are you to tell them what they should charge ?

i think you are misunderstanding their service and who they are really targeting, they introduce their service here, but they are going mainstream with it - at least it looks like that from where i'm sitting. their fee is fine imho.

its the same in my business..  some lowballs think i should charge 200 dollars for something but they expect weeks worth of full time work. lolz

Use them then, and don't complain about people complaining.

if you are free to complain about service that you are not going to use then i'm free to point out how stupid that is ;)
healthy competition will set what is fair price for such service, not you complaining.  and btw running couple of sites does not equal running a service as a serious business. completely different costs. apples & oranges.

They aren't running a serious business, YET. That's my point!

your point is that everything must be offered free to you on a silver plate - we get it.

You have no slightest clue what it takes to run a business, have staff on payroll, do the support, be up and up on legal side, continue development, cover office expenses, do marketing and somehow grow and be profitable.    

take dwolla for instance they thought they could beat paypal with cheap transactions, they didn't have any clue about risks involved with fraud. guess what will happen next? if they want to stay in business they will up their fees.

before your can voice your opinion you should finish college at least. and since you didn't get it the first time: it's none of your business how others run their businesses.

You assume a whole bunch of baloney

if community too stupid to realize they are being ripped off, not saying it's true in this case, then such community deserves to be ripped off - my point is if people will find their fees outrageous, they simply won't signup to such service, don't you agree? so no need to scream and yell how unfair their cost is only because you don't agree with it.  I'm very positive these guys have many inquiries about their service and if its good and easy to use people will pay for it whatever it costs.  plus anyone else can challenge their service and fees with a new competitive service.  what is bad about that to be so outraged with?

GREED!

create similar service and offer it for free. problem solved!

This is an excellent service. I think their fee is very reasonable. They're instantly cashing bitcoin payments out for merchants, thus eliminating volatility risk. For someone who's not well-acquainted with the bitcoin economy and doesn't have an account at an exchange, this makes bitcoins a lot more convenient.

Oh...excuse me...I thought they were only routing the bitcoin invoice widget clickthrough from the merchants website through their servers to the end user, then collecting their share, and sending the payment off to the merchant, acting as a practically useless middleman.

I guess I should take another look at it. That's what I gained from the interview. Their POS system looks helpful with the Code and the android mobile phone. But they have a way to go before they are actually providing a real beneficial service for the cost they charge. Maybe I'm wrong, i'll look at it closer.

At the very least they are doing a service to community by offering solution for easy ways of accepting bitcoins everywhere else, and if their service succeeds even at slightest it can only drive value of bitcoin itself.

This is huge really

All of our Documentation is inside the website.  You must apply, and be approved as a merchant, before you can view this.

If you are interested, please fill out the Merchant application on our website.  Thanks!

I did and I still wait for a reply!

Jack I'm sorting through a couple dozen applications this morning.  send me a PM with the email you used to signup.

I spent a few hours last night updating my website to include the bit pay option just above my PayPal payment option upon checkout.

The code was fairly easy, my main time spent was duplicating all of the hooks in WordPress and the eShop plugin to duplicate what PayPal does, the final step of sending a POST to bitpay was the easy part.

But it is close to ready for prime-time after just a bit of work. Though I will probably update the eShop plugin to allow for viewing prices in Bitcoin or Dollars.

I see this as a fairly simple solution. When I first read about bitcoin I read that it is easy to accept bitcoin for your e-commerce site. Then I looked into how difficult it really is, you have to set up a bitcoin server to generate new addresses for each transaction to allow for tracking each transaction, set up the code to communicate between a secure server and your site, unless you completely trust your website host which is on someone else's machine, not to mention the whole thing of having a server out on the Internet with wallet files.

This is just about as easy as putting a button with a form on your page. Sure you have to pay a fee. But it is worth it to save a lot of headache.

And if my site starts making so much money that the fee is too much, then I can look into putting in the effort to build the solution myself and save the fee. And I am sure bit-pay will take that into consideration if high volume customers start dropping out. But for the average e-commerce site, this is a simple solution.

He brings up a good point that we didn't get time to explain on TV.  We basically have 2 options for paying our merchants:

1.  If you don't want anything to do with bitcoins and you want dollars sent to your bank account, like what happens with Paypal or credit cards, then bit-pay assumes the currency risk and the trading fees for the full amount of the order.  We do all of this as part of the package for the merchant that doesn't want to mess with bitcoins.  Our fees for everything in this case is 2.99%.

2.  If the merchant is fine taking bitcoins, we do offer a much lower fee for this, since we don't have any currency exchange or trading risks or costs.  If you'll take bitcoins, you can use all of bit-pay's services and the fees are 0.99%.

this is reasonable.  watched the video.  looks very promising.  thanks for providing a much needed service.

I'm gonna check it out.  Looking forward to an alternative to PayPal for my website.

Og nice beats on your site.  You produce those?

Yes.  Thanks.

I'm all set to go on your site but probably won't be able to take a hard look at integration until tomorrow.  I've tried a few other sites (mybitcoin, bitwillet, etc...) and haven't been impressed.  I'm hoping that your site is exactly what I'm looking for.   ;D

@ Bit-Pay

Why don't you give out a list of merchants who use your service.

You could dedicate a section of your website for this, so that potential customers can easily find shops & vendors who are accepting bitcoin.

great idea, would help to promote idea to accepting bitcoins to other merchants as well help with exposure of current ones.

Will do.  We have had a very good response since the TV show yesterday.  As soon as a new merchant is fully up and running we will definitely announce it.  There are some pretty cool sites working on integrating it right now!

So, I imagined ;)


Do it well and do it fast and success will be yours !

This is the kind of service bitcoin needed. Congratulations :)

Awesome.  Free advertising.  My site will have your buttons integrated first thing tomorrow morning.

Idea, you could add a donate button along with the order buttons.

I have no problem paying a fee to use a merchant service.  However, they should take the donate "begging" link off their front page before they start.

I like the idea of bit-pay and will most probably make use of it in the coming weeks but I must derail this discussion just a tiny bit.

Damn you guys picked a gorgeous girl for your advertisement, I only realised what the product was about nearly 90% into the video.

Ok back on topic :)

i've been promised she will be at the BitCon in NY next month!!!

omg, I didn't see that. You must remove it. It doesn't put out a good image about a paid service.

I love the idea, but your website still needs a little work. I saw that you were designing a new the logo. That's good. Get an original favicon while you're at it ;)
The video is nice, but the girl is kind of... Well, she's good to look at, but usually there is just a voice over. If someone is seen, he/she should be working at the company I think...

But these are details. Good luck with your service.

That was during development, we can take the donate off now.

And Alison does work for us.  She will be at the Bitcoin Conference in NYC!

Wow...Pretty girls and bitcoins in the same company! :P I thought you hired her just to shoot the video. Sorry for my post then.

It helps having access to all the STARE models if we need to hire a pretty face :) 

Alison also works for Fox Sports and SpikeTV (she is "Chelsea" on TNA Wrestling) so she's not full-time with us, but she does a great job with all the public relations stuff so we can work on the code.

 Ahh, that's what I was waiting for. .....Now I can fully apologize for my criticisms of you guys. I wanted to, but had to put you up against the wall first, to get those crazy prices down for the community.
   I want to say I fully appreciate what you guys are doing, I just had a real serious problem with those prices being charged to the bitcoin community for something that does not warrant it. Good luck with your endeavor. I'll be using your services on some of my sites in the future. 1% is reasonable. Thanks!

I'm posting to say that i am like him, i prefer read things than watching a video.

So, less video and more WRITTEN things that explain this. No, i won't watch "episode 30", sorry.

Gabi we have full written documentation inside the site for approved merchants.  It's not that hard really, if you've ever made a Paypal button you can make one of ours, without needing any instructions.

Awesome!