Taking bitcoins as payment in business

[Mutton213]

Hi ,

I wanted to ask if anyone has any thoughts on accepting bitcoins as payment in the investment world. It seems that a lot of gold investment companies are now starting to take payment via bitcoins and I wanted to ask if anyone has looked at this. I'm trying to work out if people who have a lot of bitcoins are looking to trade them for tangible real commodities to hedge their bets so to speak....

I work in the wine world and we have been batting round the idea of accepting bitcoins for cases of wine.  As a newbie to the bitcoin market I wanted to get the thoughts of people here....

any comments greatly received.

J.

[bASIC]

Bitcoins are becoming more popular for payment use.

Several businesses have started accepting them.
Lately, even some major companies are using them!

If you are interested in accepting bitcoins for your own business,
you will very likely make more sales because of this decision.

[Lewis2]

Only accept them is you believe they will become a widely accepted means of pay in the future and if you believe the value will stabilize. Depends on what you are selling as well, if I had a business with high margin an a lots of income I would take the risk as only a small part will be payed in bitcoin anyway. If you are struggling to get by, remind yourself of the fact that Bitcoins might become worthless tomorrow.

[pinball]

I think it's a good idea to offer alternative payment options although if you're offering tangible goods you will probably want to lock in that profit and get the cash out ASAP!
Although if you want to get the cash out easily you will probably need to take a bit of a hit on the rate so you should factor that in.

If the exchanges were fast/reliable in getting money out then that would be ideal. In my experience this was not the case.

[XBBlade]

Be careful that the value is very volatile. So you need like 10 minute pricing on your website.

Furthermore I think you need a very secure website. But plus is that you will get more customers for sure! I mean it´s easier to spent 1 BTC than $1000 somehow.

[Lewis2]

Be careful that the value is very volatile. So you need like 10 minute pricing on your website.

Furthermore I think you need a very secure website. But plus is that you will get more customers for sure! I mean it´s easier to spent 1 BTC than $1000 somehow.

Don't agree, $1000,- is still $1000,- tomorrow. 1 BTc might be 10% more dollars tomorrow.

[Mutton213]

thanks guys, some really good points. My goal here would not be to accept bitcoins then leave them as bitcoins in the hope that the value will rise. If we accepted them I would like to exchange them for cash as quickly as possible. I have started to mine myself as a mate got me into this, hes made silly money and is sitting on nearly 100 BTC. The idea came up as I was asking him what can he spend them on and he was really only looking at converting them to cash on the exchanges.

I know it takes a little while to get the BTC sent across then converted into cash so there is a small window of risk there if things fluctuate but I'm really doing this to try and increase my wine sales.   

Will look at writing a new page on our website saying we will be accepting BTC soon.....

[rmahm]

jump in every1 is accepting Bitcoins .

[Mutton213]

Thanks guys,

I think we have now made the firm decision to be able to accept bitcoins for wine and wine investment.

Will speak to our PR guys about getting this message out there and see what happens.

[ajax3592]

Yes go ahead and you'd see the value of your payment's getting double in months.

[Mutton213]

if that happened then I would throw a wine party and you would all be invited

Will keep this thread going as an update.

Thanks again.

[fiddelingones]

You may use BitPay if you dont want to risk and have all the BTC converted immediatelly to your local currency

[Mutton213]

You may use BitPay if you dont want to risk and have all the BTC converted immediatelly to your local currency

Cheers, I will be looking into a way to quickly accept bitcoins and convert to cash so thanks for the tip.

[Mutton213]

Just a note to link a new post to the announcement that we now accept Bitcoins for wine.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=354793.0

[Gator-hex]

You may use BitPay if you dont want to risk and have all the BTC converted immediatelly to your local currency

Cheers, I will be looking into a way to quickly accept bitcoins and convert to cash so thanks for the tip.

+1 on Bitpay, recently I made a €4000 purchase with Bitcoins, they dropped in value during the transaction and I thought I'd be asked to send more payment after the timer ran down, but Bitpay picked up the difference somehow.