How To Accept Cryptocurrency Payments On Your Website

There are two main options you have for accepting Cryptocurrency payments online  - you can either sign up for an online 'hot wallet' system, for which there are many available providers. This system is technically simpler to do and can be set up faster - sometimes in only a few minutes. Your initial required investment may also be lower, or non-existent. The other option is to create your own Cryptocurrency wallet, and then modify your website to allow users to direct payments into this wallet in such a way that it would be easy for customers. This would be the 'do it yourself' option and may take longer and possibly could be more expensive upfront, but may provide security benefits or save money with lower or no transaction fees over time. We will discuss these options in more detail now.

One of the first questions to ask, if you are using an online integrated Cryptocurrency payment system, is which Cryptocurrencies you would like to accept payment in. Different Cryptocurrencies have different market caps, and some are more popular than others. Also, some Cryptocurrencies are more volatile than others and therefore either more or less appropriate for your given business situation.

If you are accepting Bitcoin and you already accept credit card payments, then you may have heard of Stripe. If you already use Stripe, it will be a short addition to your website code to include Bitcoin payments on your existing Stripe account. For their service of accepting Bitcoin payments, they charge 0.8 percent for every valid Bitcoin transaction, up to a maximum of $5. Something that is particularly useful about Stripe is that you can automatically set it to add dollars to your account even when you are paid in Bitcoin. This will also save you the hassle of separately accounting for your Bitcoin and conventional credit card payments because the accounting system is integrated in the same place. You can use their pre-coded Checkout form system, which is coded in JavaScript, or you can code it yourself with a custom API so that the form can look how you would like it to look.

BitPay is another Bitcoin payment service that you can use. With it, you can accept Bitcoin payments, store Bitcoin on your online wallet, and turn the Bitcoin into dollars, Euros, Pounds, and other currencies when you would like to. This can protect you against Bitcoin volatility because there is a feature for instant conversion at the point of sale. The transaction fees on BitPay are a 1 percent charge.

If you are thinking of including Cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin (known as 'altcoins') you may use CoinPayments, which accepts 105 types of Cryptocurrency at a transaction rate of 0.5 percent. When you include CoinPayments on your site, you install a cart plugin - a small piece of code that changes the way your 'shopping cart' system works in order to add Altcoin payments. These payments are transferred with BitGo Instant, making them very fast, and are secured by BitGo, helping to protect against fraud and theft. If your business is registered in the United States or Europe, you can use CoinPayments to have Cryptocurrency automatically converted to dollars or Euros, or converted between the multiple Altcoins. There is also a system called 'Vault' that doesn't allow coins to be spent for a certain amount of time. This is useful to prevent theft.

One other online payment service you can use is called Cryptonator. Their wallet merchant systems institute a 0.9 percent processing fee, and currency can be converted into United States Dollars, or Euros, or alternatively can be left on your wallet in your own Cryptocurrency holdings. As with the other three systems, payments are final and 'chargebacks' are not allowed - payments cannot be reversed. Setting up is quick and easy - you only need an e-mail address and an account password, and you do not need personal identification. Once you have decided to use the service, payment buttons are easily accessible, forms are embedded and checkout pages and email invoices are automatically processed.

As discussed, these four online payment systems - Stripe, BitPay, CoinPayments, and Cryptonator are all designed for ease of use for merchant and customer, quick set up time, with standard templates for forms already in existence. They also all charge transaction fees, with CoinPayments being the cheapest at 0.5 percent. Stripe's payment cap of $5 means that for payments done with CoinPayments of more than $1,000, Stripe would be cheaper.

It is worth discussing one more new option when it comes to accepting Cryptocurrency that is completely different from the other four mentioned above. That is to use OpenBazaar, which is not a plugin that you add to an existing website. Instead, it is a standalone application that functions as a marketplace. So you list your goods for sale as a vendor on OpenBazaar, and then people can find your goods and pay for them. It functions as a fully integrated online store, and you won't pay any transaction fees to a company, although since the store functions by converting users' Cryptocurrency payments to Bitcoin, there are fees charged on Bitcoin transactions that tend to vary depending on the priority placed on them. The set-up time and effort of understanding OpenBazaar makes it very different from the other four options mentioned, but it has the advantage of supporting the peer-to-peer and open source communities, as the code of OpenBazaar is fully open-source and not owned by anyone. If you are looking for a simple solution, then OpenBazaar is not it, but if you are someone who enjoys experimenting with the possibilities of Cryptocurrency technology and have more time to spend on it, and want to avoid paying fixed transaction fees directly to banking companies, then OpenBazaar may be the application for you. It is likely that OpenBazaar will continue to change substantially as to what it can and cannot do - right now it is very new software, but maybe within a few years it could be available as a plugin for your existing web store!

If you don't wish to use an existing online platform to manage your Cryptocurrency payments, it is also entirely possible to manage Cryptocurrency payments internally, acting as your own banker. The advantage of doing so is that you are entirely responsible for managing the security of your Cryptocurrency wallet. This means that your company can take steps to safeguard Cryptocurrency against hacking and theft.

While online services tend to have good security protocols, including multisignature authentication for transactions, these services are never foolproof, and their major disadvantage is that any single online wallet system is a target for hackers, because there is more potential Cryptocurrency available to steal from a wallet provider company than in the typical individual users' wallets - imagine the difference between robbing a cash-in-transit van compared to robbing a car completely at random. It stands to reason that the cash-in-transit van has a higher likelihood of being robbed by thieves. There have been high-profile thefts from large Cryptocurrency exchanges, and so far, most of the perpetrators have escaped prosecution. It is for this reason that it is recommended that if your store trades in large volumes of Cryptocurrency, that you take your own steps to secure much of your holdings of Cryptocurrency, and do not store most of it online.

Another major advantage of do-it-yourself Cryptocurrency payments online is that you may very well be able to avoid transaction fees (especially if you are not transacting in Bitcoin, which sometimes has quite expensive transaction fees).

You don't have to use the do-it-yourself method to the exclusion of integrated online payments, either. If you would like to, you can use both. You would do this by accepting payments as advised above, through a company that manages the payments. Then you can transfer your Cryptocurrency from your online wallet through to an offline technology such as a hardware wallet that your business owns. This gives you the relative security of obscurity, although of course it is up to you to take steps to secure your wallet. If you do this, it will be much harder for thieves to attack your Cryptocurrency holdings, as they will have to break into your office to steal the hardware wallet, and then also use your hardware wallet PIN that only you are supposed to know. This is one of the most secure options for Cryptocurrency storage, as it cannot be hacked through the Internet.

How Do You Include This On Your Web Site?

You will need to create a Cryptocurrency wallet, either with an online service, through a mobile or desktop application, or through the use of a hardware wallet as above. You can then show your public key for this wallet in order to receive payments directly to this wallet, or you can create a form on your website for people to pay, although you may have to code it yourself. You will not pay transaction fees, although your customer may be charged extra on the money they send. There may be a delay, and you cannot immediately convert Cryptocurrency into national currencies like dollars and Euros.

For reasons discussed above, hardware wallets and hybrid systems are best used by people who wish to hold on to their Cryptocurrency as an investment, value security highly, and are looking to avoid transaction fees in some cases. Meanwhile, integrated, pre-coded online payments are best used by people who want to hold onto Cryptocurrencies only for a short time, or which to be paid out immediately in dollars, Euros, pounds, and all for a minimum of fuss and difficulty. Therefore, which system is the best to use will depend of the above.

Right now, Jincor Blog cites research as of October 7th, 2017, that the number of Cryptocurrency users is between 2.9 and 5.8 million people. That is a fairly small market, although it is certainly growing. It is likely that Cryptocurrency adoption follows the snowball effect, meaning that the more vendors that presently sell online with Cryptocurrency, the more are likely to follow. The way to overcome this is to take the step of offering Cryptocurrency payments on your own site, and talk to other businesses and convince them of the advantages of doing so too, hosting community meetings and having interesting chats in a formal and informal setting.

As more and more people begin to adopt Cryptocurrency, the major issues with Bitcoin and some other Cryptocurrencies include its price volatility, its high transaction fees, and its long delays in processing time. A possible reason for these problems are that, in 2017, many new users began using Cryptocurrency, overwhelming the system to the point that too many new coins had to be created, and the demand and supply spiked sharply because there was much uncertainty and instability. National governments have begun reacting  - now Cryptocurrency is illegal in six countries, and the Chinese government may be looking into banning Cryptocurrency mining. As a result of all this uncertainty and dynamic change, it is currently still an early stage of Cryptocurrency. Over time, it is likely that these issues will resolve, and that Cryptocurrency will become more accepted in the mainstream.  With this change, and given the decentralized nature of Cryptocurrency, it will become more stable and less beset by the issues mentioned in this section, and more accessible as an international currency of the people.