Selling Digital Goods with Bitcoin

[mountainskyman]

Presently, it's just that it seems like it's easier for frozen molasses to run uphill in winter than it is to sell a digital product with a bitcoin payment gateway.

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[Razick]

Please explain. 

[Stunna]

I don't quite follow

[Evolekam]

Well there has been softwares being sold for BTC, it's growing daily however it hasn't grown commercially.
Most of these sellers are personal sellers that sell their own products.

[kurious]

Well there has been softwares being sold for BTC, it's growing daily however it hasn't grown commercially.
Most of these sellers are personal sellers that sell their own products.

No serious business paying rent in fiat, with employees who need paying can sell goods in BTC with the price fluctuating so wildly.  It would be irresponsible to do so.

I would not put a major portion of my turnover at risk by selling in fixed BTC prices, it would be suicidal if it was serious money.  Bit coin is just speculative unless it has a (relatively) stable price and can actually be exchanged for real items of value with confidence.

[virtualfaqs]

Well there has been softwares being sold for BTC, it's growing daily however it hasn't grown commercially.
Most of these sellers are personal sellers that sell their own products.

No serious business paying rent in fiat, with employees who need paying can sell goods in BTC with the price fluctuating so wildly.  It would be irresponsible to do so.

I would not put a major portion of my turnover at risk by selling in fixed BTC prices, it would be suicidal if it was serious money.  Bit coin is just speculative unless it has a (relatively) stable price and can actually be exchanged for real items of value with confidence.

I believe there are services to convert BTC to USD real time for merchants who don't want to deal with fluctuation risk. It's a small fee to pay to not deal with chargebacks or disputes.

[sunnankar]

Presently, it's just that it seems like it's easier for frozen molasses to run uphill in winter than it is to sell a digital product with a bitcoin payment gateway.

CoinDL makes selling or bitcoins and delivering digital goods very easy.

[Lethn]

http://bitfreak.info/bitshop/

If you have your own website this is a good option

[virtualfaqs]

Presently, it's just that it seems like it's easier for frozen molasses to run uphill in winter than it is to sell a digital product with a bitcoin payment gateway.

CoinDL makes selling or bitcoins and delivering digital goods very easy.

But how does CoinDL deal with disputes? (Or any other merchant. Would seem like a trouble.) Sure there's a receipt to show something was accessed or downloaded. But what about "goods not as described."

[btcfile]

We've just launched a service that covers what you're looking for: http://btcfile.com Should take you seconds to sell any digital goods. No registration needed, just upload files and set a price.

[halfawake]

I plan on selling books for bitcoins when the novel I'm working on is finished - in addition to selling them on Amazon, of course. 

btcfile, what do you plan on charging merchants once the launch period is finished?

[btcfile]

We don't know yet, it really depends on what the costs of running the service end up being once the site attracts a lot of users. It's also possible that we try an advertisement-based model first, which would allow us to keep the service free. We could also keep the existing service free forever and only charge for special features that don't exist yet. There are a lot of possibilities and we'd prefer to avoid using a percentage fee is we can. There's no hurry to start charging at this point, building up our user base is more important.

[halfawake]

A fair point.  I think you may have problems with the advertising model, because I can't comment on other business people, but I personally would want to use the API approach where people wouldn't know that I'd be using your site since I'd only interface with it through the API.  I can't think of anyway you'd be able to deliver ads using this interface that wouldn't negatively impact the user experience of the customer downloading whatever the item is. 

But maybe you meant ads only for people who bought items hosted on btcfile?  That would make more sense.  I hope you succeed with your business, anything to make bitcoin more frictionless is a good thing in my book.

[Hawker]

Presently, it's just that it seems like it's easier for frozen molasses to run uphill in winter than it is to sell a digital product with a bitcoin payment gateway.

It works for us.  Its not a big earner as most Bitcoin get hoarded but the gateway works fine.

[btcfile]

But maybe you meant ads only for people who bought items hosted on btcfile?

Yes that would be only for people who use our checkout page, 3rd parties who use the API A to Z wouldn't be affected. We wouldn't inject ads into the content, that would just be obnoxious.

[altsay]

BTC price curve has been flat recent weeks. This is reinforcing these sort of ideas i think.

[Abdussamad]

One problem with selling for bitcoins is that transaction confirmation takes too long. I suppose users could be emailed the link to download after confirmation. But there are problems with that approach as well. For instance what do you do if the email ends up in the spam folder and the user doesn't see it? Email tends to be unreliable.

[yumcoin]

Actually, it's really easy to sell your digital goods for Bitcoin!

Check out Yumcoin, our service that lets you upload your product and set a price, and get paid instantly with Bitcoin:

• Upload a digital product (eg. music, videos, ebooks -- anything that's a file)
• You'll get a unique short link you can share anywhere with your audience, fans and followers.
• There's no setup or monthly fees. Yumcoin takes an extremely low commission of just 1% + .0025 BTC per sale.
• Payouts are quick. Once a sale's transaction is confirmed, you can send your balance to any Bitcoin address of your choice.

Sign up here: https://yumcoin.com

Here's a sample product on Yumcoin: https://yumcoin.com/p/osZO

Check it out and let us know if you have any questions or comments. Follow @Yumcoin on Twitter for the latest updates.

Cheers!

-Yumcoin 

[Bogdan]

Well there has been softwares being sold for BTC, it's growing daily however it hasn't grown commercially.
Most of these sellers are personal sellers that sell their own products.

No serious business paying rent in fiat, with employees who need paying can sell goods in BTC with the price fluctuating so wildly.  It would be irresponsible to do so.

I would not put a major portion of my turnover at risk by selling in fixed BTC prices, it would be suicidal if it was serious money.  Bit coin is just speculative unless it has a (relatively) stable price and can actually be exchanged for real items of value with confidence.

kurios is right it lost $30 value a week ago.

[AliceWonder]

One problem with selling for bitcoins is that transaction confirmation takes too long. I suppose users could be emailed the link to download after confirmation. But there are problems with that approach as well. For instance what do you do if the email ends up in the spam folder and the user doesn't see it? Email tends to be unreliable.

That's what I plan to do. Once transaction confirmed 3 times (6 seems excessive for most transactions), product is theirs for the download.

It's up to them to check their spam filter.

Several places have APIs that make it easy to see when transactions have been confirmed X amount of times.
Using unique address for each transaction, it largely can be automated.