hosted ecommerce solution working with bitcoins

[killerstorm]

I see plenty of shopping cart interfaces, but no hosted, i.e. SaaS solutions for web shops and supplementary stuff. (I.e. for people who do not want to maintain their own servers.)

I know some guys in a company which provides such hosted solution. It's a small company and you probably don't know it, but they have existing customers who use their webshop and accounting software and are happy with it.

So... I talked with them about bitcoins, they say they might consider adding it as a payment option, but they are skeptic about market size. Are people interested in such hosted solution or they are happy with installing and using some open source thingie?

So... What's best way to gauge interest in such project? Poll on this forum, something else?

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[Stephen Gornick]

So... I talked with them about bitcoins, they say they might consider adding it as a payment option,

There is a first mover advantage.  The first to offer hosted online e-commerce (along the lines of what Shopify, BigCommerce, Volusion, etc. offer) will attract some e-commerce site customers simply because there are no alternatives.

they are skeptic about market size.

Have them survey prospects.   Are there many e-commerce sites that:
 - Would like to sell internationally?
 - Would like to be able to sell without getting defrauded through chargebacks?
 - Feel they are paying too much to the payment processor?

Whomever is the first to serve this market with a decent solution is going to do well.

[gadsdengraphics]

I've got too many projects right now, but high on my list of pending projects is writing a Bitcoin server that will work with Ecwid. They have a custom payments gateway feature that just requires a service to emulate the well-documented Authorize.net API.

It would be somewhat limited - I can think of ways to make a store Bitcoin-only, or to make it dual-use with the price in BTC floating based on the price of the primary currency, but not a way to price things statically in BTC while accepting state currencies as well.

Still, Ecwid has a very low barrier of entry, is pretty, and works well. Plus, with an Authorize.net API wrapper around the service, I imagine it would make it easier to tie into other existing products in the future.

If someone else doesn't do this, I will likely do it in the near future.