Thanks for sharing this! You gave us the link to the full review, but could you just give us the highlights here? Im sure there are people interested as this seems like it could be a big deal for small shops. Also, did you get a chance to try out any real transactions yet? I would love to hear how the user experience actually feels.
The plugin is definitely still in beta. For it to be truly useful to small shops, they'd need to refine it a lot and put it in the Wordpress.org plugins directory so that installing it on wordpress sites is easier.
I have done a number of test spends. The user experience is okay. Since it requires woocommerce, most of the flow is the same as a normal woocommerce checkout flow. Once an item is added to the cart and the customer clicks check out, it redirects to a Glow Pay page that has a QR code. The customer pays this and then is redirected back to the original shop.
I still am having trouble with the redirect, but I think it may be on my end.
As I said in the OP, prior to this I used a CoinOS plugin that was also a little clunky, but I have done quite a few sales over the last year via this manner and never had any trouble. The main improvement I see in this Glow Pay plugin is that it is made by Breez and hopefully will be maintained by them (the CoinOS plugin I was using had no affiliation with CoinOS and I don't think it was actively maintained). Also, Glow Pay seems relies on Spark, so this is a different set of trade-offs than fully custodial lightning.
All in all, I think I'm going to continue using this on my shop for a while. I have been neglecting the shop, so I don't exactly do very much volume. I'll report back if I have troubles though.
I just read the review that OP posted. I think it's kinda short, and he can probably squeeze them in another post if he wants to. From my understanding, his biggest issue is probably changing from sats to USD to make the plugin work properly.
The Breez guys did update the plugin to include sats denominated pricing so that's nice.
Yes, it relies on a third party to generate the QR you are paying. I tried for a while to run my shop using phoenixd which can be connected to BTCPay Server, but it was clunky and I'm not great with tech so it would go down and I wouldn't notice for a while.
This is an interesting plugin, but it seems that there is no way to import xPub. You can generate your own seed phrase directly from Glow Pay based on what I see on the demo.
Is there a way to import the master public key rather than the seed phrase?
There is also a passkey option, but it does not work. I am stuck at the passkey creation page; when scanning it with my phone, it fails to create.
I don't think importing a pubkey makes sense here. This uses Breez's SDK, which is based on Spark. So the seed phrase you'd need to import is probably a Spark seed phrase. Which raises the question if this is even lightning. Spark users can receive lightning, but Spark itself is a statechain and it's debatable what sort of unilateral exit to Bitcoin mainchain one has. Spark people will tell you that it is a sure thing. I'm not so sure.
If you just want to accept mainchain bitcoin payments, woocommerce with a BTCPay Server plugin is enough. I think there are some good guides on this out there. This one from BTCPay isn't bad:
https://docs.btcpayserver.org/WooCommerce/If you want to accept lightning on a webstore, it gets a little tricky because your node must be live for you to receive payments. Spark is one way people are solving that problem, I suppose.
