More and more small businesses throughout the world are finally waking up to the benefits of accepting Bitcoin payments. Zero chargebacks, low (and sometimes no) transaction fees and no transaction reversals are big boons, but they’re only the beginning.

On a broader scale, accepting Bitcoin eliminates the hassle and expense of cross-border transaction fees, opening merchants up to new markets across the world. Latching onto the Bitcoin payment trend can also thrust early adopters into the media spotlight and help them stand out from the competition.

“Bitcoin can reduce [merchants’] credit card processing fees to less than one percent,” said Nicholas Tomaino, business development manager at Coinbase, a San Francisco-based global Bitcoin wallet and merchant service. “This is especially appealing for small businesses that sacrifice anywhere between three to five percent of their revenues to these fees.”

Related: Square Market Now Takes Bitcoin Payments

Some 50,000-plus merchants around the world already accept Bitcoin, Tomaino said. The “vast majority” of them, he said, are online businesses, not brick-and-mortar operations, making the in-store corner of the market “ripest for bitcoin to disrupt.”

The barrier to entry for most online and brick-and-mortar merchants: they don’t know how to accept Bitcoin and they lack the technology to accept it.

Enter the growing wave of point-of-sale payment processors racing to the rescue, seizing on the opportunity to equip businesses with the tools to make accepting Bitcoin a seamless process.

A game with many players

“People have bitcoins and want to spend them and our job is to make it easy for merchants to accept them,” said Tony Gallippi, co-founder and CEO of BitPay, a leading Bitcoin payment processing service provider that launched in May 2011.

The Atlanta-based startup helps more than 30,000 merchants process $1 million in Bitcoin transactions daily across the world. Some of the more recognizable businesses in the BitPay bunch include Virgin Galactic, WordPress, Shopify, Gyft and TigerDirect. BitPay’s Mobile Checkout app allows retailers to receive Bitcoin payments on their smartphones or tablets.

BitPay offers monthly pricing plans and charges no per transaction fees. Plans range from $30 to $300 per 30 days, depending on the scope of your support needs and the total amount of purchases processed per day.

Some other mobile Bitcoin payment apps available today include BIPS, Coinbox, GoCoin, the last of which also enables transactions in Litecoin and Dogecoin as well.

Related: More Major Retailers Are Getting Ready to Accept Bitcoin

Revel Systems, which also launched in May 2011, is a major player in the iPad point-of-sale checkout systems space. After noticing that some of its clients were already accepting Bitcoin, the San Francisco startup recently partnered with Coinbase to add Bitcoin integration to its hardware-software iPad checkout payment systems. Revel serves small and mid-sized brick-and-mortar retail and food industry businesses, including Goodwill, Belkin, Dairy Queen, and Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen.

Lisa Falzone, Revel’s co-founder and CEO, said merchants have no choice but to broaden the range of alternative currencies they accept to meet the rising demand, not just for Bitcoin.

“We see a lot of potential in cryptocurrency, mobile payments and other capital that have yet to be invented,” she said. “I think Bitcoin is just one of the many electronic currencies that will emerge in the future. Developing POS platforms that are payment processor and digital currency agnostic will allow for the development and usage of future cryptocurrencies as they evolve and develop.”

Related: Bitcoin Owners: There's Now a Bitcoin-to-Cash ATM Card

When a customer pays with Bitcoin on Revel’s cloud-based POS system (perhaps for a bucket of fried chicken from Popeyes), the employee at the checkout stand simply selects the Bitcoin payment option from the iPad screen. Next, the customer scans a QR code that appears on the iPad payment screen using his or her smartphone Bitcoin wallet app and, in about the span of a minute (significantly longer than processing a standard debit or credit card payment), the transfer of bitcoins is complete. An email confirmation is then sent to both parties.