
Shopify Merchants Can Now Accept Bitcoin - allsop8184
http://www.shopify.com/blog/10446157-shopify-merchants-can-now-accept-bitcoin
======
aresant
Very exciting.

I think they could further enhance merchant adoption by rewriting with an even
more laser beam focus on the "benfits" vs. the "features"

Eg eliminate the top paragraph entirely and rework their current bullets to
something as simple as:

\- - - -

Start accepting Bitcoin today and you'll:

a) Get paid your full retail price in your local currency (or in Bitcoins if
you prefer) settled daily.

b) Pay less than half the fees of a normal credit card transaction (about 1%).

c) Never receive another charge back.

Click here to add Bitcoin to your store right now.

\- - - -

The wording isn't perfect ( particularly bullet (a) ) but you get the point.

The "positioning" of Bitcoin as a currency is hard to understand for most
merchants and ALWAYS leads to questions about volatility etc.

So in the spirit of "Don't make me think" anybody building Bitcoin as a
service startups should work hard on messaging.

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svmegatron
Shopify rules. It seems like every week, they roll out another cool new
feature. Shopify Payments and POS got a lot of attention here, but another
excellent recent feature is gift cards! Gift cards are SO nice to be able to
sell during the holidays.

I also have a fraud-screening app that is tightly integrated with Shopify:
[https://www.merchantprotector.net/](https://www.merchantprotector.net/)

~~~
enraged_camel
I looked at it, but gave up after I couldn't find pricing information. I don't
want to sign up for a free trial before I know the pricing breakdown.

~~~
svmegatron
Totally understandable - pricing is not 100% certain yet, so I'm not really
featuring it. I'll make a note to add it more prominently once I make up my
mind a bit better!

------
sheetjs
> You can choose to receive your payments in Bitcoins (paid into your Bitcoin
> wallet) or paid in your local currency directly into your bank account every
> business day.

If you choose to receive local currency, what rate do you receive? Are you
guaranteed a rate? Does it fluctuate daily (and as a result, can you quote
prices so that they change daily as well?) and do you know the rate in
advance?

~~~
pushrax
[https://bitpay.com/bitcoin-exchange-rates](https://bitpay.com/bitcoin-
exchange-rates)

~~~
sheetjs
Yes, they note that they use bitpay on the website:

> Our new Bitcoin integration is available through BitPay and can be used
> alongside other payment services, like Shopify Payments and PayPal.

But they don't mention whether there are any service fees added by Shopify

~~~
brianalkerton
We treat Bitpay transactions the same as any other in terms of fees/pricing.
There's a 1% or 2% transaction fee on plans with lower monthly fees, but those
are waived if you use Shopify Payments for credit card acceptance (even on
Bitpay transactions).

A better breakdown can be found here:
[http://www.shopify.com/pricing](http://www.shopify.com/pricing)

~~~
sheetjs
That would be something useful to note on the website

------
nedwin
We were looking at adding Bitcoin to our startup but worried about the
volatility. What if all our customers paid in Bitcoin and it crashed?

The reverse is also true - we might gain upside if the price continues to
Skyrocket - but how do you protect yourself from this?

~~~
blhack
Bitpay immediately converts your Bitcoin payments to USD. Customers pay with
BTC, but you receive USD.

~~~
makomk
Well, assuming Bitpay can afford to meet the USD payments. Behind the scenes
they can't actually convert Bitcoin to USD instantly, so they're basically
eating any change in the Bitcoin-USD rate between the transaction happening
and them cashing out. If there's a big enough crash or they receive so many
payments that the market cannot absorb the Bitcoin sales, they could easily
find themselves unable to meet their obligations. (Things actually looked a
bit hairy when BFL used them for payments just because of the sheer amount of
Bitcoin they had to convert in a short period.)

~~~
mortehu
> Behind the scenes they can't actually convert Bitcoin to USD instantly

What if they have an agreement with one or more exchanges, and complete the
transaction by satisfying the current highest bids?

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adrow
So if someone is running conversion tracking at checkout for analytics etc...
what currency gets reported? The post says:

"You can choose to receive your payments in Bitcoins (paid into your Bitcoin
wallet) or paid in your local currency directly into your bank account every
business day."

If your shop currency is set to GBP but someone pays in BTC, what gets
populated if using {{ shop.currency }} and {{ total_price }} for example?

~~~
gravitronic
I believe the interface to bitpay works with USD, so you will see USD here
whether or not you keep the bitpay funds in BTC or autoconvert to USD.

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mmuro
This is very interesting. Half of my customers are international and accepting
Bitcoin might increase that number.

Definitely going to check this out.

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CurrentB
Pretty cool but I wish either that they had integrated with coinbase instead
of bitpay, or that bitpay would hurry up and approve or deny my 3 week old
application.

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atmosx
Awesome now people can spend their bitcoin!!!! Good luck finding that kind of
people.

------
melatoned
It took over 3 years for Shopify to develop gift cards...and how long for
Bitcoin?

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salient
Is there a way to do recurring payments with Bitcoin yet?

~~~
simplemath
You can set up recurring payments on Coinbase.

