Wanting Advise from Websites that Accept Bitcoin

[classicshirtsforhim]

Hi, my name is Mark and I have had a fairly successful eBay business selling shirts for guys.  Bitcoin has interested me and so, while expanding my business and building my website, I decided to accept bitcoin.

I have had several people ask about bitcoin payments for eBay and I looked into it and began accepting them (kinda outside eBay - and probably against their numerous policies).  In any case, it worked out great and there were really no issues.  Now that I am building the website, there seems to be all sorts of roadblocks.  After a couple of weeks of looking at shopping carts, extensions for those shopping carts, online wallets to accept the payments, methods of getting the current bitcoin exchange rate, etc. it seems like a major headache.  I think I have it worked out though, but was hoping that there may be others out there that have had good success with non-bitcoin-related sites that accept bitcoins, and would be willing to share some tips, secrets, pitfalls, and so forth.

I finally settled on using OpenCart with the BIPS extention and another extention called OpenCart_Bitcoin from John Atkinson at BTC Gear.  I really only use the last one to make prices appear in BTC and autoupdate.  I had to tweak the code a bit to disable the rest of it.  Then I use the BIPS module to process payment via BIPS.  So far they seem okay.  (Any info?)  The only problem is (and it is not really a problem), I have to enter product prices in BTC.  If there was a huge swing in BTC prices like a while back, I would have to go in and manually change the prices to reflect this.

Also, is there much demand for non-bitcoin products paid for by BTC out there?  I see a lot of sites that say they accept BTC, but really that is more like "We accept PayPal" and they do not seem to be that BTC-centric.  Could someone point me in the direction of some good, successful BTC based non-bitcoin sites?

Thanks in advance,

Mark 

[classicshirtsforhim]

Ohh, and also...

If someone has some good advise on where to advertise to attract bitcoin users.  My site only takes bitcoin, so mainstream channels do not seem very feasible.

Thanks,

Mark

[The Bitcoin Catalog]

What is your site exactly?

[classicshirtsforhim]

What is your site exactly?

I sell new and used mens clothing.  I am still working on the site at the moment, mainly trying to get more product up.  I hope to have a more full inventory done by next week (10k + items).  I also need to flesh-out a few things here and there.  The site is classicshirtsforhim.com and I am looking to get ahead on the advertising as soon as possible.

Thanks,

Mark

[gollygosh]

thanks for the advice - hope others will throw in some more stuff here so as to allow the merchant side of bitcoin to grow.