No we are not in the business of selling drugs, munitions or any other illegal stuff. We sell app templates. So why have we decided to accept BitCoins on MyAppTemplates?

We now accept BitCoins because developers like BitCoins, and we like developers. Look at what developers care about on Hacker News. It’s the cryptocurrency, and the democratisation of trade away from sovereign restrictions. Like the internet did with information, Bitcoin is doing with commerce. This is why devs love and champion BitCoin, and we love devs. So we decided to start accepting the currency du jour amongst the developer community.

There are other advantages too. We like to make buying as easy as possible, which means accepting as many payment methods as humanly possible. I have seen lots of websites that only offer payment via PayPal or others who don’t accept American Express. If you are a merchant doing this I can guarantee, you are missing out on sales. At a bare minimum I would recommend that you have PayPal, MasterCard, Visa and American Express if you are selling online internationally.

Despite offering PayPal, MasterCard, Visa and American Express you may find that some customers are still unable to purchase on your site. PayPal for example is not available in all countries (Nigeria is one) and credit card merchants may deny transactions for high risk countries as well. That means that some genuine customers are unable to purchase from your site through no fault of their own. BitCoin allows these customers to purchase on your site.

The third benefit of BitCoin is that it allows you to lower your transaction costs by bypassing PayPal which charge $0.30 per transaction plus a percentage transaction or credit card merchant fees which can be as high as 3% per transaction. You also reduce the risk of chargebacks which are a total headache to deal with and also cost your business money.

Let’s be honest here, the other reason that might start accepting BitCoins is that you might get that extra bit of publicity for your product or business. Unless you are a big brand like Amazon or Delta Airlines for example you’re unlikely to get a front page spread for accepting BitCoins but you may still be able to leverage some publicity.

Since cryptocurrency is so on trend right now if you are the first to accept BitCoin for your product/service or first in your geographical region a well-crafted PR release might get you some coverage.

Failing that you can always submit your business to the hundreds of Bitcoin directories that are on the web right now which is sure to give your site an SEO boost.

Easy set up is another reason to accept it. It’s not complicated or mysterious nor do you need a big black overcoat to accept it. Depending on how you wish to accept BitCoins on your site either into your own wallet or via a service like BitPay the process of setting up is easy. The whole process took use about 30min to setup. The experience for the customer is no different as well, we now have a Bitcoin payment option on the bottom of out checkout screen and it’s just as easy to use as all our other payment methods.

With all these reasons to accept it, and almost no drawbacks, the actual question should be why aren’t you already accepting Bitcoin?!