The promise of digital currency includes instantaneous, frictionless and fraud-free payments. Coinbase Merchant Tools are helping over 43,000 merchants and their customers around the world to pursue that promise. In characteristic Coinbase fashion, we’re working to make their experiences even better.

Over the last several months we asked our top merchants and our own customer support teams how we could improve the Coinbase Merchant experience. Our aim was simple: To create a hassle-free, silky-smooth experience for everyone involved.

We’re proud to announce a few simple changes that are already making a real difference.

Partial Refunds

We’ve added the ability to add partial refunds to Orders. If a customer purchases 10 items and wants to refund just one, our new merchant tools allow you to easily refund a partial amount of bitcoin instead of their entire order.

Improved Reliability

We’re excited to announce that we are now using Insight as our BlockExplorer. With more reliable transaction confirmations, we’re improving the experience for merchants, their customers, and Coinbase support.

Overpayments

Overpayments occur when the wrong amount is sent for an order. An overhaul to mispayments has been our number one requested merchant feature for some time. Our legacy system, designed long before we fully understood the type and likelihood of potential human errors in the checkout process, made it a little too easy to create a mispayment. Once an order was deemed a mispayment, it triggered a series of reconciliation steps that weren’t fun for anyone.

We’re proud to introduce Overpayments. In our legacy system, we frequently saw customers accidentally overpaying for their order, whether due to transaction “miner” fees being unnecessarily added, or due to errant keystrokes. Now, when the BTC amount exceeds the listed price, the Order is automatically completed but flagged as overpaid . This way, the customer will successfully receive their items without merchant intervention.

Furthermore, we’ve made it very easy for the merchant to refund the customer who accidentally overpaid. We track the original fiat price of the order to make it clear what amount to refund.

Mispayment Buffer

Mispayments created unsatisfying customer experiences and a lot of work for everyone involved. We’ve built a way to allow merchants, through our v2 API, to create simple mispayment buffers. Mispayment buffers are percentages that can be applied to either side of the quoted order price, declaring a customized, merchant-specific range of acceptable payment amounts.

For example, let’s consider an Order for 10 BTC with a 1 % underpayment buffer. A customer who accidentally pays 9.9 BTC will successfully complete the order, while someone who pays 9.8 BTC will not. This gives merchants more control, allowing them to determine what is best for their business.

Continuous Improvements

We aim to continue improving our merchant tools, and welcome your feedback. Please post questions and feedback in our Community Forum here.