Shopify Merchants Can Now Accept Bitcoin | Hacker News Reader

Shopify Merchants Can Now Accept Bitcoin

shopify.com

91 pointsallsop818429 comments

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.

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/

Thanks for the kind words, Will. Onwards & upwards!

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.

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!

> 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?

https://bitpay.com/bitcoin-exchange-rates

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

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

That would be something useful to note on the website

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?

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

I hope this will not always be the case with merchants, otherwise Bitcoin will never sever its ties with the dollar.

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.)

> 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?

My bet is that you don't have to worry about it, because only a VERY small percentage of your customers will actually pay using bitcoin.

If all your customers paid in BTC, it's very true that you might take on an unacceptable level of risk. But as a practical matter, accepting BTC as an alternate form of payment might be a great way to diversify your holdings.

The integration uses Bitpay, which can either a) Convert the bitcoin to your local currency upon payment, or b) deposit the bitcoin directly into your wallet (in bitcoin).

If you go with the first option, nothing is really different. You accept bitcoin, but you get the payment in your currency.

I suppose you could just withdraw your money as and when you get it.

The BTC support we offer is through a 3rd party merchant gateway. As a shop-owner, you are simply accepting payments via BitPay (our partner) which converts the BTC into a currency you find acceptable and deposits it into your accounts.

Awesome, thanks for letting me know. Time we revisited BTC payments then! :)

It's called variance. It will either go up or down. However, the general trend of Bitcoin is upwards so it's easier to argue that it's more likely to go up in value. So accepting Bitcoin as payment is +EV in my opinion.

However, some businesses currently could suffer if they accepted Bitcoin due to it's volatily. If you're selling SAAS your cost is tiny so accepting a more +EV payment currency is probably beneficial.

However if you're selling physical widgets on very slim margins and don't have anything in place to reduce your exposure via quick selling of Bitcoin, and cashflow is/could be an issue it's probably not suitable.

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?

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.

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

Definitely going to check this out.

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.

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

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

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

You can set up recurring payments on Coinbase.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com