Take advantage of the blockchain and accept cryptocurrency payments on your e-commerce

Today thanks to various payment gateways and well programmed plugins it is easy to start accepting cryptocurrencies on your online store even if you only have a little of technical knowledge. This guide will help you to setup your store for cryptocurrencies. I will go through the setup of the payment provider of cryptocurrency, plugin for your e-commerce platform and converting the crypto back to government issued currency (fiat), because unfortunately in most of the cases you still cannot pay your supplier bills with cryptocurrency.

Why should you start accepting cryptocurrencies?

Firstly, be a part of the future and support the cryptocurrency community. Many of the cryptocurrencies are actually meant for digital payments. Secondly, it is a sad fact that many people hold a lot of coins but can use them only for a really limited number services else than trading. Thirdly, you might also see increased sales when you start accepting cryptos, just let the community know about you.

We at Renjer Snacks started to accept cryptocurrencies last week and since then, after promoting the fact, we received a lot of orders with various cryptocurrencies. As cryptocurrency freaks ourselves it has been amazing to see all the love we have received from various communities. We got posted by Monero on Twitter and Facebook. Additionally, we received a lot of upvotes on Reddit on r/litecoin and r/monero. If you want to check out how the process of purchasing with cryptocurrency looks like for our customers, visit our website: www.renjer.ky, add something to the cart and test it out. We are currently using the Coinpayments.net plugin.

Let us talk about the actual process of accepting cryptocurrencies. So far, we have experience on two different payment gateways for cryptocurrencies: Coingate and Coinpayments. I will shortly describe the functionalities of both of these platforms, so you can weigh which platform to integrate for your store. Both of these platforms are entirely free to integrate and charge relatively low fees compared to traditional payment processors such as PayPal or Stripe.

1. Coingate (www.coingate.com) — 1% fee to receive BTC payments

Coingate is a Lithuanian fintech company providing a Bitcoin payment gateway for merchants. You can also accept various altcoins through Coingate, but note that the altcoins are always being exchanged back to Bitcoin through Shapeshift (www.shapeshift.io) integration, which increases the cost for the end customer. For solely accepting Bitcoin (BTC), Coingate is totally fine. Before you can start using Coingate in production mode, you need to verify your business with them by sending in documents that you will easily find in your office (company registration, supplier invoice etc.). The verification is similar as you would register on an exchange as a private person, but in Coingate’s case it was really fast.

Usage

Coingate is enough if you want to only accept Bitcoin. Coingate allows you to receive pure BTC or convert it to USD or EUR directly after the customer purchase, which is great for the user experience and to reduce the mess around crypto’s and your company. You can further transfer your BTC to your company BTC wallet or the fiat can be transferred to your company bank account. If you decide to convert the BTC directly to Fiat, you will not need to use any other exchanges. This makes the overall process simple.

Integration

Coingate provides integrations for the largest e-commerce platforms such as WooCommerce and Magento. We installed their WooCommerce plugin, because our website runs on Wordpress. The plugin was really easy to setup and the customer payments went through smoothly. The installation for the plugin was easy like an installation of any other WooCommerce plugin. You can download the plugin .zip file from Coingate or just install the plugin directly from Wordpress plugin directory. The final connection is done with an API key that you just simply copy paste from Coingate to WooCommerce settings for Coingate. To track the purchases Coingate hosts a sleek dashboard from where you can track the Bitcoin transactions of your customers.

2. Coinpayments (Coinpayments.net) — 0.5% fee to receive crypto

Coinpayments is a payment gateway for multiple cryptocurrencies from Canada and they accept global customers. As of today you can accept 150 different cryptos through their gateway, naturally including all the large ones. Coinpayments allows you to accept different cryptocurrencies to their own accounts (wallets), when Coingate only allows you to accept BTC (but altcoins through Shapeshift). This makes Coinpayments a better gateway for those of your customers who hold something else than Bitcoin.

Usage

Coinpayments UX does not look so fine compared to Coingate in my opinion, but once you figure out how it works it is easy to use. It is easy to choose which currencies you want to accept. You can see the whole list here. You can choose to accept one, ten or all of them. We decided to stick with the biggest ones, but if we decide to accept more one day it’s just one click on their dashboard. From each respective wallet for separate coins you can withdraw the currency to another wallet or an exchange. Coinpayments also supports exchanging some of the cryptocurrencies to BTC inside their service, but then you again have to pay BTC network fee for each transaction, which is high these days.

If you wish to trade your cryptocurrencies to fiat, I would recommend sending the funds from Coinpayments to an exchange of your preference and convert the cryptos to BTC. Next step would be to send the BTC to a service that will buy your BTC for fiat. To convert BTC to euros we are using a service from Coinmotion (https://coinmotion.com). They charge 3% on the sale of BTC and 0.90€ for a SEPA transfer. You need to be verified on Coinmotion to use their service, but the verification is simple. Please note that using Coinmotion for the BTC -> EUR/USD transfer is completely optional and you can use any other service that provides the same for business customers.

Integration

Integrating Coinpayments with your own platform works in the same way as the Coingate gateway. Pick a plugin for your e-commerce platform from here and install it like any other plugin. The final connection with Coinpayments and your e-commerce is done with an API key and a secret password, which you need to choose.

This being written, I hope that this guide has been informative to you and has helped you to integrate cryptocurrency payments for your own business. Remember that for the adaption of cryptocurrency to our everyday life merchants like you and me are vital so we can be proud of ourselves being the first ones to accept cryptocurrencies. Always check your local legislation and regulations regarding cryptocurrencies to comply with the law.

Note for admins: Please setup two factor authenticator for each service you are using to protect your funds using Google Authenticator for example. Just a password is never enough these days.