How can I take altcoin/bitcoin payments for my website?

[kevindeangelis]

I'd like to offer bitcoin and altcoin payments on my website, does anyone know a way in which I can do this?  Is there a service/gateway that I can use?  If not, do I need to set up a wallet address and check confirmations?  How would I do this?
Thanks in advance!
-Kev
www.WhereToMine.com

[domob]

It depends on how you prefer to do it.  You can take a look at BitPay, for instance - I've never used it, but from what I know this allows you to integrate a Bitcoin payment rather easily and you can even get the coins' value in USD automatically.

If you just want a simple method, a very basic method is to have a list of addresses on your server and a script which hands out each new customer a new address from the list.  You can then check the addresses manually, and whenever funds arrive, ship your goods to the customer.  How many confirmations you want to have is in this case solely your choice.

[kevindeangelis]

If you just want a simple method, a very basic method is to have a list of addresses on your server and a script which hands out each new customer a new address from the list.  You can then check the addresses manually, and whenever funds arrive, ship your goods to the customer.  How many confirmations you want to have is in this case solely your choice.

A few questions, it looks like bitpay only accepts bitcoin.
How could I generate a wallet address? and how can I verify funds have been sent to that address? Is there a way to do that via linux command line?

What I'd really like to do is something like how Cryptsy works when you deposit funds.  For example, select the currency that you'd like to deposit, have a wallet address generated, and when you send funds to that address, a way to show what has been deposited and/or pending.

[domob]

If you just want a simple method, a very basic method is to have a list of addresses on your server and a script which hands out each new customer a new address from the list.  You can then check the addresses manually, and whenever funds arrive, ship your goods to the customer.  How many confirmations you want to have is in this case solely your choice.

A few questions, it looks like bitpay only accepts bitcoin.
How could I generate a wallet address? and how can I verify funds have been sent to that address? Is there a way to do that via linux command line?

Yes of course, by using the original "Satoshi" client (aka bitcoin-qt), which can be found on bitcoin.org.  You don't need the "-qt" part with UI, it also comes with a command-line client.  You first have to setup the daemon on the server, which can be started with "bitcoind -daemon".  When it is running, you can use "bitcoind" to perform various tasks - see "bitcoind help" for a starter.

To generate a wallet address, use "bitcoind getnewaddress" (as the simplest method).  To check for incoming transactions, you could periodically run "bitcoind listtransactions" and see if something new happened; also, there are other commands that can be used to extract the balance on addresses.

I do not yet understand what exactly you want to do on your webpage.  Is this a shop?  Or should it be an online wallet?  Something else?  Maybe I can help you if I understand that better.

[kevindeangelis]

To generate a wallet address, use "bitcoind getnewaddress" (as the simplest method).  To check for incoming transactions, you could periodically run "bitcoind listtransactions" and see if something new happened; also, there are other commands that can be used to extract the balance on addresses.

Fantastic! Thanks!

[halfawake]

It depends on how you're wanting to do it - if you want to not have to deal with the nuts and bolts of bitcoin like wallets and such, your best bet is to use either bitpay or Coinbase.  If you don't mind doing some configuration yourself, I've heard good things about Bitcoin SCI: http://bitfreak.info/?page=tools&t=bitsci  Bitcoin SCI will generate a new address for each customer, which is best practices for working with bitcoin.  It does require access to your private key on the server in order to do this, however, just something to be aware of.