Bitcoin Forum

Hello everyone

I have a question for the people that run their own business and they accept Cryptocurrency.

We have multiple services online and we only accept bitcoin/LTC/ETH/dogecoin and USDT (but only 1%-5% of our customers use it)
The problem we are facing is our customers send us the payments and we keep the payments in the store wallet (plisio), we don't withdraw and exchange the money unless a certain amount has been reached, because if we exchange the amounts on every transaction then we will lose a lot of money.

and in the past 3-4 days bitcoin was going down a lot and we lost a lot.

So we are effected by :
1- Withdrawals fees
2- Exchange fees
3- Current market prices
4- We can't HODL or keep the money longer than 7 days because we are a business and we have a lot of expenses/providers we have to pay.

My question is how do you people manage to keep as much profit as you can? how do you not get effected by the market prices?

Thank you in advance!

I think most companies (that don't use payment processors) use their profits to hold crypto.

If you're not in that position have you worked out what's costing you the most? I don't think eth, ltc or doge fees are high but eth is? I'd stop accepting thst if I were you.

Also, try to send transactions with as low a fee as possible as much as you can (btc might confirm on Sundays at 1 sat/byte for example much better than it'll confirm during a Tuesday - that's something you can look at doing).

Holding funds in addresses users pay into shouldn't be problematic either from a security and privacy standpoint imo.

You could always add a bit onto the exchange rate too like a lot of payment providers do so you don't lose out on transaction fees (eg 1-5% might go unnoticed).

If I will refer to one of the known merchants here in our place, they accept crypto but not actually holding it.

They are using a service that instantly converts Bitcoin into fiat. That third-party exchanger is a crypto-service.

In short, crypto is just an additional payment method but the company is still getting the converted fiat value of it upon a successful transaction.

Of course, these are factors to look at when accepting cryptocurrency.
You just have to define your purposes for a ceiling cryptocurrency properly. You mustn't have expected it to always go up and up and up. The market will continue to be unpredictable and as such, should you not be so focused on the profits that might come from hodling, you should be ready to accept the loses when they do come as a part of the market.

Fortunately for you, there are stable coins you could always swap BTC/ETH/Dogecoin and other altcoins for. Stavle coins keeps your profit and cost for purchase in tact. Swap and you dont have price falling to worry about.

This will just give the customers an additional access of paying with cryptocurrency and the service provider receive it in the form of fiat. It won't benefit in any means for the receiver. To profit out of it, the service provider needs to find ways of accumulating the profit in the form of cryptocurrency.

if you run a business using transactions using crypto, you have to be really careful and don't be in a hurry when selling it, for fear you sell it when the price is down, you said there are many needs to buy and you use crypto and sell it, even though the market is down , that's not good in my opinion, better wait until the market is stable or up, because if you sell it when it goes down, it can make you lose, so be patient and wait for the market to go up and sell later.

Thank you for the great ideas, we will start implementing some of them.

1-We will first find a replacement for our current payment gateway for example coinbase or any other payment gateway that support crypto exchange within the same wallet without having to withdraw the amounts to another wallet just to exchange the money (less transaction fees)

2-We will advertise USDT more to our customers and give them 10% extra balance if they used it to encourage them more because it's the safest (i think)

In my area there are no shops or the like that are willing to accept payments in the form of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin/LTC/ETH/Dogecoin. After all, here (where I live) the legality of cryptocurrencies is still as a commodity asset and cannot be used for payments so that no particular store is willing to accept payments in any form of cryptocurrency, including stablecoins.

So it can be concluded that if you want to manage profits that are not much and far from losses, then try accepting cryptocurrencies such as stablecoins (USDT, BUSD, & USDC) where you can exchange them anytime you want without being hindered by bad market conditions. Because Stablecoin as I suggested it never has a big influence in terms of price so you can still keep your capital intact, as long as you don't expect huge profits from it because that's clearly not possible.

I'm not really familiar with businesses accepting crypto thru plisio, this must be something that you have to sort out within that platform which you could trade the coins into an altcoin that just needs less withdrawal fee and minimum amount to withdraw.

Eshop must be hard to manage when there are fewer crypto users, try promoting your business in the forum. 1%-5% of your customers may increase after that, maybe you'd find faithful clients.

If you are planning to switch to coinbase then I suggest you can use more binance and then you will decide which one suits you better, binance features instant conversion between crypto assets. For example: when you receive bitcoins from customers into your wallet on binance, then you can convert it instantly to USDT or any other token to avoid bitcoin price fluctuations. If you use Binance there is no need to advertise USDT, focus on bitcoin because you can convert BTC to USDT very quickly after receiving it with almost no conversion fee.

I just checked out the merchant page on Binance and i had no idea they provide a payment gateway

We will differently integrate their payment gateway API into our services

Thank you very much for this info!

Volatility is one part you can't cut off from crypto. Accepting crypto as alternative payment channel is best for big business who can afford a market analyst to monitor prices that way they can decide when to hodl and when to sell. For small and medium entrepreneurs having a third-party exchange that coverts direct to fiat is best way to stay off excessive transaction fee from ETH and price fluctuations. Since it's strictly as payment channel then having your keys and coin might not be necessary

I don't know your local currency, is it in USD or another currency?
If your currency uses its own currency,  I will advise you to make use of P2P channels, so that any Bitcoin you receive can be instantly converted to your own currency since you run day to day business and may be in need of cash, I think you can make use of p2p if your local currency is also in USD, all you need to do is to immediately convert your bitcoin and litecoin to USD at soon as you get a confirmation from the sender since p2p price are determined at the conversion time, you don't have to compensate if the buyer didn't send the money on time when the price drop below the price you put it up for sale. This should cover all your 4 questions since p2p are mostly free.

I don't currently have a business running and accepting bitcoin but regarding your questions, I guess the answer can be different depending on the business for example if you are selling something you will need to exchange the cryptocurrencies to fiat periodically otherwise you will have to use bitcoin and cryptocurrencies to supply the products to sell in this case that's very important to have a service with low fee rates, otherwise and if you don't need to supply any products you won't need to exchange anything and this can be a positive point for people when they accept bitcoin for their business.

AFAIK, There are two ways companies accept cryptocurrency:

 - The first is using open source payment processor: Often the goal is long-term investment in Bitcoin, so that Bitcoins has not been converted into dollars until after several years.
 - The second is using conversion crypto payment processors: in which the money is received in dollars in your bank account instead of Hodling it, taking 1-5% of the value of the transaction.

Well, you could always plan a budget in advance and just cash out the Bitcoin for fiat as soon as you make the sale. The rest of the profit that you do not need for your business expenses can be put in a hodl pile. As to the budget, you should have a rough idea of how much your expenses will be. If you really want to play it safe then sell and withdraw your Bitcoin on the same day as you receive them. That way you will not have to worry about volatility.

As to the fees question, you can integrate the fees into the prices. Although honestly, if you use exchanges to transfer Bitcoin, they will charge your ridiculous fees. So use a wallet like Electrum.

There is a simple solution to this, use stablecoins and then invest whatever you have left. This way you would be accepting crypto again, USDT or BUSD would be considered in the crypto world, and moving that via BSC or TRX will be very cheap as well and withdrawing it would be cheap as well.

So, you would turn that into cash whenever you need it, doesn't lose value overnight, but does lose value over course of few years due to inflation, which means you could put 10-20% or whatever you can afford to back into bitcoin and the rest will go towards covering your expenses. I do literally the exact thing and have been quite happy with the results so far, I can tell you that much.

If I got correctly you want to use cryptocurrency as a payment getaway but don't want to lose value or don't want to lose transaction fees. In that case, you have to use the non-custodial wallet service. This facility would give you BtcPayserver. It's a non-custodial wallet and accepts altcoins as well. You can send funds immediately to the exchange and convert them to avoid loss of value. Otherwise have to accept only stable coins.

I was going to say the same thing as @harizen said. 3rd party services which offers a crypto/fiat solutions are not new but I think there are lots of them now, now that crypto is becoming a mainstream. That is because many merchants are also trying to add cryptos as one of the payment methods. Using a crypto doesn't always mean that we will hodl it because crypto's original purpose is actually a currency/money. Those who hodl a crypto are different and they are called hodlers/investors.

Merchants can add some fees on their services if needed only to use those 3rd party services and as a costumer I think they won't complain with that because in return of it is that they are now using their cryptos to avail their favorite services.

Tbh, this is business and you do what will keep your business healthy and profitable. You don't follow the trend and suffer losses.
If I say you used use an exchange that triggers to fiat immediately there is deposit, you will still not avoid the exchange fees, you could only avoid volatility.

My advice is that if there is not favourable way for you, only accept stable coins like USDT you mentioned. Almost everyone that can use BTC, ETH, LTC etc can use stable coin. So, you can continue with stable coin for the mean time till you figure out how to go about it.

If prices' volatility is hurting your business, then you have to solutions, either:
 - implement a payment gateway which supports converting crypto deposits into your fiat currency. I took a look at Binance Pay (https://merchant.binance.com/en) but not sure if they support this feature. Afaik, Coinpayments (https://www.coinpayments.net/) support it (I didn't try them myself so, plz, do your own research).
 - Only accept payments in stable coins (usdt, busd..)
If many of your customers pay in btc and you don't want to lose them, you may consider accepting lightning payments.

It has very simple solution.

I have a store we accept only crypto . We don't accept any cards .

Following are the suggestions I can give so that you don't face any cashflow problems

 - Change your payment gateway to Bitpay or NextPayments.
- Store the crypto in your own wallet
- You can sell the crypto in P2P market or ChangePay like sites.

It is a tough and time consuming but not complex or hard one.