The cryptocurrency Bitcoin is quickly gaining ground and accepted on more and more online stores around the world. It is safe to say that the virtual currency isn’t going away and any serious e-Commerce store owner should start accepting Bitcoin in their Magento shop as soon as possible. There are a lot of advantages to accepting Bitcoin in your Magento shop.

The first and most exciting advantage is that accepting Bitcoin payments are the extremely low transaction fees. With Paypal or Credit Card payments you are looking at an average transaction fee of 2-5% + $0.30 per transaction, in Bitcoin it’s lower than 1% and $0.00 additional costs. The second advantage is that Bitcoins payments are final and can not be charge backed like Paypal or Credit Card payments. Add fast transactions of less than 3 seconds, global usage and a huge publicity bump to the advantages and it becomes very clear why accepting Bitcoins in your Magento store is a must.

There are a few easy to integrate Magento extensions available on the Connect marketplace. The ones we list below have been personally tested by our team of Developers to ensure that they work properly. We have listed the best extensions for you that can help you start accepting Bitcoin within a few minutes.

Coinbase is the most popular Bitcoin payment processor and they have recently released a Magento extension as well, which can be downloaded here. You can install this plugin by copying and pasting the files in your Magento root folder through FTP. After you have installed the plugin, navigate to System > Configuration > Payment Methods > Coinbase in your Admin panel. You can setup your account in the Admin panel, and easily obtain your API key and Password in your Coinbase account dashboard. Paste these keys in the extension configuration and hit save.

Additionally, you can configure a custom success page that you want to show to Bitcoin customers after a completed payment, which is very nice. Enable the extension and your Magento shop will now accept Bitcoins. Coinbase offers 0% fee’s for the first $1 million dollars processed through sales on your site, after that the fee is fixed at 1%.

BitPay

BitPay is the second Bitcoin payment processor, and they have developed an awesome extension available on their Official Website. The extension is installable through the Magento Connect Manager, but you can also upload the files through your FTP client. After you have installed the extension, you can navigate to System > Payment Methods > Bitcoins in your Admin panel. There are a few configurations like the country’s you’ll allow to pay with Bitcoin, the currencies they can use and the sort order of the payment gateway. You will also need to enter your API key, which can be obtained from the BitPay merchant dashboard.

Before you can access your API key you need to signup for a Merchant account with Bitpay. After you have filled out the form, you will get your login credentials. Navigate to API > API Keys when logged in, and fill out the key in the appropriate section in your Magento Admin panel. The standard fee on payments is 1%, but this can be reduced to 0% by getting a premium plan. These premium plans are awesome for store owners as you’ll pay a monthly fee to Bitpay and are able to process payments with 0% fee in return. Their professional plan costs $30 monthly and lets you process up to $10,000 daily. There are bigger plans available for bigger corporations, but for most store owners this plan will do just fine.

BIPS

BIPS (Bitcoin Payment Solutions) is another Magento Plugin available for download on the Connect Marketplace. Active since 2011, this extension was the first Magento extension that integrated Bitcoin payments into online stores. Although the plugin costs $67, it’s well worth the price considering the fact that you’ll be able to process Bitcoin payments right on the checkout page in your store. Visitors will never leave your store which gives a great user experience. BIPS also offers a very detailed API for developers to create custom solutions for Magento when needed.

As you can see, integrating Bitcoin payments in your Magento store shouldn’t be a problem. We recommend BitPay and Coinbase for small stores that don’t need a lot of customization options, and BIPS for big corporations that want to built custom solutions for their online stores.