Helping Businesses Take Crypto Payments. The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

[DaveF]

So the other day I posted this about Wix & BitPay partnering to allow Wix customers to take BTC / crypto payments.
As we know, BitPay is not that great a company when it comes to BTC in general.
As a general feeing some people here like them, some hate them.
When someone who does not like them @o_e_l_e_o stated they would not use any merchant that uses BitPay I asked what they told the merchant.

Yes. In my template "I'm not using you because of BitPay email", I include links to why I refuse to use BitPay (https://debitpay.directory/anti-bitcoin/) and to alternative solutions (https://github.com/alexk111/awesome-bitcoin-payment-processors). In my experience, the small independent vendors or merchants, in which the merchant themselves is actually reading the email at least show interest and are often unaware about why BitPay is such a terrible choice. However, the larger companies where you are talking to someone in customer support just send back a template "We are sorry we have lost your business" or similar email.

I am only touching on the custodial / hosted ones for now because I am assuming merchants using BitPay just want fiat.

The problem is IMO that *some* of those vendors listed on their BEST day are WORSE then BitPay on their WORST day.
It's not just the customer facing crap. It's the not just the back end and the pricing. It's not the fact that I can get BitPay up and running on a clients site faster then I can get though most others signup since the signup process on BitPay is quick & simple. It's not that the conversion to fiat and deposit is faster on then most others. It's all of that combined.
And lets talk about the conversion rate.
I spent the last hour (before starting this post) looking around for different merchants taking BTC and faking a sale to get to the payment screen see what the BTC -> fiat price was. I prepped everything and then went back till all were ready and then went to the payment screen.
As of then:

BTC pricing:
Preev = $61,130
Coinbase  = $61,148

BitPay = $61,115
Coinpayments.net = $61,001
CoinGate = $61,055
globee = $61,109 (FYI the gitbub link page is wrong their fee is 1.96%)
nowpayments = $60,505 (WTF?)

How many of us look at preev and then at the payment gateway and whip out our credit card instead of taking that small pricing hit.

Some of them I could not find merchants that use them.
Others seem to be out of business or the links on the page are dead (strike).

Others are just well, scummy confirmo is hiding fees upon fees. getting paid has a fee of .8 to accept a payment BUT when they send it there is a 14EUR fee and another 1/2 a percent. Kind of fucks up that $99 sale. (https://confirmo.net/pricing and then click payout pricing)

So that is IMO a tough sell for people. When I saw the nowpayments price I thought something was wrong and tried again. Nope, same price.
With the fees that globee charges it's tough to justify to someone who needs / wants to convert to fiat to use them instead of BitPay

So lets move to the hosted ones.
Blockonomics no longer converts to fiat, Payscrypt never converted to fiat, Bittery.io deos have working send to an exchange but that's it you have to do it yourself or hope for the best.
OOPS, guess you really can't get fiat that easily.

Remember, we are not talking about tech businesses here. Just general online ones that want to accept BTC / crypto.
Even if they have more control doing it themselves takes some time and effort and knowledge. That they may not have. If they hire people there is another expense.
 
Now, lets move onto some other BitPay news I posted about a while ago:

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210928005348/en/BitPay-and-Verifone-Partner-to[%E2%80%A6]rrency-Acceptance-on-Payment-Terminals-and-In-
AppeCommerce

So now at the RETAIL POS side you are going to have merchants having the ability to just show you a QR code and you pay with crypto.
BUT, comes the argument BitPay is bad. Once again, yes it is. Followed by, and what are the odds of a NON TECH merchant adding a 2nd payment platform  with a separate back end and more accounting work to be done to reconcile payments from another source? I'm going with 0.

Now it comes back to customers.
What works best for us. I have a bunch of domains at namesilo
They take BTC though themselves they also take BTC and other cryptos through BitPay and take credit cards.
My credit card that I use there gives me 3.1% cash back on internet purchases.
Quiz: Does Dave use BTC or a credit card there?

I will not use any store that charges a credit card fee. You can get me once if I missed seeing it on the door, but I am never coming back. *Unless the CC that I am going to use is giving a larger % back then their fee. But the cost of taking credit cards is part of the cost of doing business.  Do you really think that these places that charge to use a CC are going to take your BTC for free?

So, I just presented this mess of what the situation is IMO. For now, merchants want / need fiat and are going to do whatever it takes to get as much of it as easily and as cost effectively as possible. Complaining about BitPay is great, but what are we doing to provide a REAL solution for it.

because tl;dr
1) Most merchants want fiat.
2) Most merchants don't want to deal with getting crypto and taking the time and expense of converting it to fiat.
3) Most of the other crypto -> fiat gateways suck (IMO)

Do we as a group go after the better platforms and tell them to get their heads out of their asses and give better rates and easier signups?
Do we pick on the lesser of 2 evils and promote another big player?
Something else?

Note: I did not touch on BitPay evil /KYC thing because I am a realist and know that some of their larger investors are major public companies who would rather pull their funding then worry about some government agency crawling up BiyPay's ass because they ran $58 of through their gateway that came from some ransomeware scam.

As for the rest of the https://debitpay.directory/anti-bitcoin/ links, there are some things that are true others that are just BS. If you want to discuss it, ping out or open another thread I will discuss. I just think at times it's easy to complain about them and not have a good replacement.

Enjoy the rest of the weekend.

-Dave

[o_e_l_e_o]

I didn't want to be the first reply since my hatred of all things BitPay is well known, but no one else seems to be jumping in.

I don't know what the solution is. Is BitPay easier from a merchant point of view? Sure. Do they offer better rates? It seems so. Does any of that matter to me? Not at all. The whole point I got in to bitcoin in the first place was not to make profits (although no one can honestly say that's not a contributing factor), but because I wanted to be in control of my own money. I don't want an intermediate third party deciding when and what I can spend my money on, and I definitely don't want an intermediate third party demanding I register an account with them and complete KYC just so I can buy some coffee. I've made cash purchases upwards of $5000 without having to complete KYC. Demanding KYC for a $5 purchase in bitcoin is completely unacceptable.

As I said, I'm not a merchant so I don't know what the solution is, but I will continue to vote with my wallet and will never use such an anti-privacy and anti-bitcoin service. If I have to search for another vendor, or if I have to pay an extra 1% by taking my business elsewhere, or if I have to pay in cash instead, then those are all small prices to pay in my opinion to avoid BitPay.

Its the same idea behind why centralized exchanges can continue to rip off users with obscene withdrawal fees of 50-100k sats or even more; because people put up with it and continue to use them. If everyone abandoned Binance right now and cited this blatant profiteering as their reason, you can guarantee the withdrawal fees would be slashed by >95% by tomorrow. If everyone refused to acquiesce to BitPay's ridiculous requirements, then either they would change them or every merchant would move to a better payment processor.

[DaveF]

Was holding off on the reply hoping that someone else would chime in. Guess it's just us.

...
because tl;dr
1) Most merchants want fiat.
2) Most merchants don't want to deal with getting crypto and taking the time and expense of converting it to fiat.
3) Most of the other crypto -> fiat gateways suck (IMO)

Do we as a group go after the better platforms and tell them to get their heads out of their asses and give better rates and easier signups?
Do we pick on the lesser of 2 evils and promote another big player?
Something else?

...

Is really the heart of what I posted, the rest is all the leading up to it.
I would like to see us promoting one of the other larger players. But who?
Eliminating Coinbase Commerce since they are US based and for their hosted solution going to eventually fall in line with BitPay KYC.

According to this: https://bitpay.com/stats/ they are processing about 60000 a month / 2000 transactions a day.

Outside of the poor exchange rate I do like coingate. I know a lot of merchants don't because even if you register as a business whoever sets up the account has to verify who they are too.
But beyond that, how much can they handle? How large is their staff? If there is an API issue @ 3 in the morning is there a support number to call? and so on.
If I ever have any of that mythical free time, I'm going to have to dig for that information. The signup issues, my just be related to the country they are based out of.
But for now, I guess we still wait to see if anyone else chimes in with any other ideas.

-Dave

[NeuroticFish]

I don't know how relevant it is for you, since it's another country here, but most of the few times I've bought for bitcoin the merchant used a local payment processor (Netopia) and I've paid 8-10% over the preev price.
I paid once via BitPay too, but so long ago I don't remember if I had to put my details (I think I didn't have to back then).

While unfortunately this doesn't help the ecosystem, if I have to put my details anyway there, sorry, but I find Bitcoin cards cheaper and more handy (yeah, some may start throwing stones on me now..)

[o_e_l_e_o]

I would like to see us promoting one of the other larger players. But who?

Of the merchants I have used regularly or are currently using regularly, then the payment processors I have used most frequently (as a customer) are BTCPay, CoinGate, CoinPayments, and OpenNode. I have had no problems with any of them, haven't noticed any big pricing issues, have never been asked for KYC, and have never had mixed or coinjoined coins refused or questioned. As I have never used a payment processor to accept payments, then I cannot comment from that side of things.

I realize that BTCPay is quite different from the other three, but I would be more than happy to start pushing for any one of these.

[Webetcoins]

There is a saying that no matter how good you try to be, you can never be able to get everyone to like you. That is not possible, but just continue to do whatever it is that you’re doing as long as you believe that you’re doing the right thing. So no matter how good and how hard working Bitpay team may be, there will always be people who are not satisfied with their business.

If Wix chose to partner with other companies such as Blockchain or Coinbase, there are still going to be people who are going to complain that they made the wrong choice. I have also seen a lot of other crypto wallets and exchanges and how people complain about how bad they can be.

[hatshepsut93]

IMO things will change only after some years when:

1) Lightning network payments are the standard, so there's no problems with confirmation times and fluctuating exchange rate

2) Bitcoin is less volatile and more merchants are open to accept it directly

Until then payment processors will suck, and in general user experience for an average person without deep knowledge would just be way too bad to use Bitcoin payments regularly.

[o_e_l_e_o]

If Wix chose to partner with other companies such as Blockchain or Coinbase, there are still going to be people who are going to complain that they made the wrong choice. I have also seen a lot of other crypto wallets and exchanges and how people complain about how bad they can be.

The difference here is that, from a consumer/customer point of view, BitPay is substantially and provably worse than any other payment processor. It's not just a case of "I like this one more". BitPay invades your privacy and attacks bitcoin in a way no other payment processor does.

1) Lightning network payments are the standard, so there's no problems with confirmation times and fluctuating exchange rate

I'm not sure this would solve the problem. Most merchants will still not want to hold bitcoin directly, so will be looking for a payment processor to instantly convert their lightning payment in to fiat, which leads to all the same problems as have been discussed above.

2) Bitcoin is less volatile and more merchants are open to accept it directly

Now this is indeed the holy grail. Once merchants can use bitcoin to pay their bills and staff, and want to hold it themselves, then payment processors (or at least, custodial ones which offer fiat conversion) become far less necessary.

[hatshepsut93]

1) Lightning network payments are the standard, so there's no problems with confirmation times and fluctuating exchange rate

I'm not sure this would solve the problem. Most merchants will still not want to hold bitcoin directly, so will be looking for a payment processor to instantly convert their lightning payment in to fiat, which leads to all the same problems as have been discussed above.

I'm not saying that it would mean more direct use of Bitcoin by merchants, Lightning adoption could also make the job easier for payment processors, so there will be more competition and better rates / less KYC and other bad things for consumers.

[coupable]

We all want to have full control of our keys and this almost the majority of us don't like using a third part, especially for small payments.
Is BitPay easier from a merchant point of view? If they are ignorant people, then maybe it's their best option compared to other paiement gates as mentioned in op. However, isn't better to use a free payment protocol like BTCpay, but this would require merchant to be familiar with bitcoin network.

I used to use BitPay to fill my Neteller balannce and to pay my stuff in NameCheap. And as there are no other options i can use, i found it pretty good. However, i hate the condition of i have to pay an invoice only by using their official BitPay Wallet or Electrum, or i have to make additional work by analysing the invoice link using additional tool .

[SquallLeonhart]

If Wix chose to partner with other companies such as Blockchain or Coinbase, there are still going to be people who are going to complain that they made the wrong choice. I have also seen a lot of other crypto wallets and exchanges and how people complain about how bad they can be.

The difference here is that, from a consumer/customer point of view, BitPay is substantially and provably worse than any other payment processor. It's not just a case of "I like this one more". BitPay invades your privacy and attacks bitcoin in a way no other payment processor does.

Unfortunately they are one of the first and that is why they are one of the most known as well. Plus they did not focus on making themselves better and only focused on marketing themselves better in B2B format. This way they reached to a lot of companies and told them that they could accept bitcoin as payment if they used BitPay and convinced a lot of companies to accept it.

This way they grew bigger and bigger to a lot of places whereas they are not really making any type of return, I mean if they were actually doing good then they would be some place that would be good in the long run and everyone would love them, but this way they are wide and spreading everywhere instead of just high places.

Can you imagine apple accepting bitpay? Of course they won't, this is why they are doing very bad and I believe that they are going to be getting less and less customers in the future but for now they are good at B2B marketing and that's why they are so famous.

[Ani_]

(crypto payment related to work aspect)

Have you considered some job platforms which allows us, freelancers, to be employed and paid in crypto? I mean, yes, employer must agree to proceed with process there, and be aware about crypto. But, in order to become mainstream, we should always ask them/present them solution - because it us wu=in for them, and us (taxes, fees, speed of transaction). moreover, Escrow system! Trust is very important aspect.

[Kakmakr]

I have to agree with you, BitPay is a merchant's worst nightmare!

A year or so ago, I walk into a tyre repair/fitment shop and I see a "Bitcoin Accepted here" sign. I know the owner and we started talking.... saying that it was one big mess and he is reconsidering his decision to accept Bitcoin payments.

BitPay KYC requirements and their "limits" on certain things was a absolute joke and his invoicing and the price differences was just as bad. (Customers compared the price with Preev.com and got into arguments with the owner.. over the difference in price)

BitPay is hurting the merchant adoption ...more than they are helping it to happen ...at this moment. 

[Hydrogen]

because tl;dr
1) Most merchants want fiat.
2) Most merchants don't want to deal with getting crypto and taking the time and expense of converting it to fiat.
3) Most of the other crypto -> fiat gateways suck (IMO)

Do we as a group go after the better platforms and tell them to get their heads out of their asses and give better rates and easier signups?
Do we pick on the lesser of 2 evils and promote another big player?
Something else?

The most obvious solution is to create a stablecoin designed to cater to the needs of retailers. Which can easily, affordably and conveniently be pegged to the dollar and held to mitigate volatility. Retailers can exchange their bitcoin and crypto for the stablecoin seamlessly as the transaction occurs. To prevent volatility from having an impact.

I'm very surprised someone hasn't already done it.