How I Run An Online Bitcoin Shop For Less Than $150 A Year Jon Hodl Follow Apr 10 · 6 min read

Stacking passive sats with help from some free, open-source tools.

“I Want Bitcoin”

When I first got into Bitcoin, I became completely enchanted by it. It took me less than 15 minutes to understand the basic concept but as soon as I fully grasped the implications of it on a global level, it became apparent to me. I want bitcoin. I was all I could think about. Shortly thereafter, I decided to buy my first $20 worth and experiment with it to see how it worked.

That’s where the problems began. In order to buy, I had to jump through all sorts of hoops just to exchange a $20 bill for some of this new technology. That’s when I said to myself “I need to be able to accept this as payment so I don’t have to deal with buying ever again.” but there was a problem.

I have no idea how to accept it as payment. Where do I even begin?

The first step was to start some sort of online business and then try to figure out how to accept Bitcoin as payment. There was another problem though. I had next to $0 to get such a business started.

That’s when I decided to get creative. I needed a way to start a business with as close to $0 as possible. In order to do that, I had to do the following:

Decide On A Product To Sell

Buy A Domain Name

Purchase Web Hosting

Build a Website

Set Up An Online Store

Find people who actually want to buy my products.

That’s a lot to do with $0 in my pocket but I managed to do it with very little capital. Here’s how I made it all happen.

My Bitcoin T-Shirt Shop

One of the biggest obstacles that I have encountered when it comes to onboarding no-coiners and new-coiners is that people don’t know why they should use bitcoin. Whenever I’ve talked to my friends and family about it, none of them seemed to understand WHY they should use Bitcoin because their USD system “works fine”.

Instead of explaining myself over and over again, I decided to make some simple reasons to use Bitcoin that I could easily share with them. Nothing more than a simple sentence or two that would get people thinking.

After I had a few of these reasons put together, I decided that I wanted to print them on t-shirts and stickers and see if I could get more people to ask about Bitcoin. The only problem was that I had little to no money to fund such a venture.

So, how do I get shirts printed when I have $0 at my disposal?

I did some Googling and found a few different companies that allow you to upload your own t-shirt designs and sell them in your own store that’s hosted on their servers.

I uploaded some designs and told some people about them and made exactly 2 sales. Yes. 2 sales. Those sales were also in USD, not in BTC (which was my goal). I was officially in the business of selling Bitcoin t-shirts but I needed to scale and the t-shirt company I was using didn’t have any option to accept Bitcoin payments.

That’s when I realized that I needed to set up my own shop.

Hosting My Own Site

I don’t want to get into too many of the boring details of getting your own website started but I will break down my costs to get the basic website underway.

Domain Name with Google Domains: $12 per year.

Web Hosting with Bluehost: $120 per year.

That’s it. That’s all I spent to get my own website launched.

After doing some more research, I came to the conclusion that I needed to use Wordpress since it seems to be the industry standard for self-hosted websites. After hours and hours of frustration and Googling, I finally got my website live on Wordpress but still no online store.

Wasting Time & Money On Shopify

Once my website was live, I did a bunch more Googling to see the easiest way to launch an online store. I had heard of Shopify back in the day and decided to give it a try. It came with a 30-day free trial and then $30 a month each month after that. I decided to give it a shot for 30 days and see how I liked it.

Now that I had my own store, I added all of my products and was open for business but still no Bitcoin payments. In order to accept Bitcoin on Shopify, I had to use a service called BitPay which I was less than excited about since they require all sorts of KYC and they take a percentage of each and every sale.

That seemed antithetical to the values that Bitcoin was built around.

After several months of paying $30 a month for Shopify, I decided that it was a waste of money and I decided to cancel my Shopify subscription and look for an alternative e-commerce platform.

WooCommerce Was The Key

In order for my bitcoin store to come to fruition, I needed the perfect combination of tools and services. I gave it a lot of thought and came to the conclusion that I needed 4 things to come together.

An online store that integrates with my Wordpress website

A Bitcoin payment gateway that integrates with WordPress AND my store.

Integration with my t-shirt fulfillment service

Free to download and no monthly fees -This was KEY!

After a good bit more Googling, frustration, trial, and error, I finally found an e-commerce platform that met all of these criteria.

WooCommerce is the tool that brought this project to life.

It’s free. It’s open-source. It integrates with so many other services. It is literally the catalyst that enabled me to bring all of the other services together and have a shop.

Now I had all of the tools to finally get my project off of the ground.

Launching My Bitcoin Shop

Now that I finally had all of the tools I needed, I put my shop together.

First, I installed the WooCommerce plugin for Wordpress so that my shop was live.

Next, I followed the tutorial provided by my fulfillment service on how to integrate it with WooCommerce so that when I receive an order, they print the shirt and send it off to the customer.

The final step was installing my bitcoin payment gateway so that I can process bitcoin payments.

I had officially done it. I had officially launched my own company that runs on a free, open-source, e-commerce platform and uses a free, open-source payment gateway to accept bitcoin payments.

Reasons To Use Bitcoin was officially born and my overhead was (and still is) about $12 USD per month.

The Bottom Line: Cash-Flow Positive

Here’s how much I spend each year for a “set it and forget it” online business that stacks passive sats.

Domain Name: $12 per year with Google Domains

Web Hosting: $120 per year with Blue Host

Shopify: I wasted probably about $200–300 before I decided to pull the plug so don’t make the same mistake that I did.

WooCommerce: $0 per month.

Wordpress Bitcoin Payment Gateway: $0 per month.

T-Shirt Fulfillment Center: $0 per month but they take a percentage of each sale. I don’t pay anything until a sale is made so there’s no monthly overhead.

My current annual cost: $132 USD.

Here I am today with a small, cash-flow positive, bitcoin business on my hands where all I do is some basic content marketing and collect slow but steady product sales.

Thank You!

I hope that you’ve found something of value in here that helps you to get your own bitcoin store or business started. If you have any questions, please let me know and I will do what I can to help you. It’s my goal to get at many other people to accept bitcoin too so I am happy to help.