Bitcoin Forum

I have a web site www.vpn3000.com, that provides VPN and VOIP services.

For VOIP I am using a2billing, however it does not have support for a bitcoin payment system, and it is better to have things automated, I have decided  to completely dump paypal and improve and automate everything using bitcoins.

Here is my idea, under a2billing there is the concept of vouchers, a voucher is basically a large number like a pin that represents a certain amount of money, the voucher concept is already integrated in a2billing.

I am thinking of setting up a site with a billing cart separate from a2billing to sell this vouchers, using bitcoins as the payment system.
The voucher which is a numer is like a pin, it does not require physical shipping, but it is important that this number does not get seen until after the payment has been made, it is like a pin number representing credit in dollars, so you pay for it in bitcoins, the voucher gets delivered either by email or directly at the site, and then using the voucher you can add credit in a2billing to your voip account.

Any recommendations on the software that would be good for something like this:
There is a list of shopping cart modules at:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Category:Shopping_Cart_Interfaces

But most shopping carts are designed to sell physical goods, in my case I intend to sell vouchers which are just numbers representing dollars, but making the sale in bitcoins.

If you know of a good open source package for doing this please let me know,  I think in the page under shopping cart interfaces there is probably software that is good for this purpose, if you are familiar and know if a package that will work for this purpose please let me know, also if you know what does not work also let me know, that way I concentrate on the packages that could work for this purpose.

You could probably adapt a2billing to support Bitcoin, or pay someone to do the work.

adapting a2billing for bitcoins  would be nice, but it is a lot of work, to pay someone to implement the support of bitcoins in a2billing is something I would like to do, however at present I do not have the resources, and it would be very costly. a rough guess it will probably take somewhere between 20 to 40 hours of work, and at a rate of $100 per hour, that is lots of money, maybe my estimate is way off.

I tried to do the implementation myself, and it turned out a little more difficult than expected here is why.

A2billing gets the market rates for usd, euro, pesos, etc all from yahoo finance, yahoo finance does not have support for bitcoins, entering a bitcoin value directly on the database for bitcoin manually had this problem, as soon as the other values where updated using yahoo  finance, the value for the bitcoin btc was lost.

The other problem is that all the companies that provide reseller voip service sell in either dollar or euros, not a big problem since when loading the database the values could be converted to bitcoin.

The important part is the payment procesor, that is the part that would be nice to integrate in a2billing, one idea would be to have a bitcoin payment address for each customer, so when a customer makes a payment, a2b somehow check with the bitcoinserver if payment was receive and automatically fund the account.
That would be the elegant way of doing this which is more complicated.
The part where the account is funded, part of the code could probably be reused from the paypal module, for the payment address that is simple is could be an entry in the customer information an extra field in the database.
To verify the payment by contacting the bitcoinserver and then funding the account requires some thought.


A simpler method, not as elegant, is to create  a separate web site to sell vouchers, where the voucher is just a number that represents payment under a2billing, once the voucher is sold using bitcoins, then the voucher can be used using in a2b, that way all I would have to to is setup a site to sell the vouchers in bitcoins.
There is software that probably does this already, maybe opencart, virtuemart, zen cart, etc, the problem I am not familiar with any of these software packages, I could start by trying one at a time and see which one seem to fit better for this purpose.

But I have to agree with you, having bitcoin integrated in a2b would be ideal, and it is a much better solution to the problem, several month ago I posted about this integration in the a2billing forum but there does not seem to be much interest in bitcoin in the a2b forum, but as bitcoin gets more popular that may change.