We are stoked to announce that starting today 2/27/2018; we will begin accepting Bitcoin payments through BTCPay. This is an effort to eliminate the third party intermediate and further enhance the privacy of our customers.

By processing Bitcoin payments directly, we believe that we’re also doing the ethical thing since our business depends on the cryptocurrency community. Furthermore, we’re hoping to give an example to other store owners and encourage them to start accepting the payments the same way.

If you’re a merchant and you have any questions about how we set up our BTCPay, get in touch, we will gladly help you out.

Since the day one, our store has accepted Bitcoin payments, and we tested a large number of processors. From a merchant perspective, taking the payments directly means that we needed a robust server which in our modest beginnings was not cost-effective and was too technically complex. We’ve searched and tested numerous solutions and nearly all of them have trade-offs.

Thanks to the tremendous effort of Bitcoin Core developer, Nicolas Dorier, and the BTCPay community, who have done an excellent job in forking BitPay payment processor, we were able to set up our node and accept the payments directly to our Ledger wallet.

BTCPay is an open-source and free project. They do not charge fees, they do not process your payments. BTCPay is a team of Bicoin believers who made it possible for mechants like ourselves to become our own bank. BTCPay server configuration and the Woocommerce plugin we’re using are free. Their documentation and community support is free.

BTCPay enables Woocommerce store owners to create the full Bitcoin Core node running on the server and accept payments directly, with no IP or information leaks to third parties.

To thank Nicolas and BTCPay project, we will be donating a portion of our profits in the next few months to their project together with our continued support of charities like BitGive.

To be completely honest, we never had trouble with our third-party processor CoinGate. As the matter a fact, we still believe that they are probably the best Bitcoin payment processor out there. Not only does CoinGate has great ethics as a company, but they’re continuously innovating in this field. If you’re a tiny website who can’t afford 70$ a month, or you just want to test out how Bitcoin will work for your business model, you can give CoinGate a try.

The use of BTCPay will cost us around 70$ a per month for the Azure server.

If CoinGate is so awesome, why have we switched to BTCPay? CoinGate was great, cost-effective solution which enables easy fiat conversion, since they allow merchants to buy and sell bitcoin through them. We don’t convert our bitcoin payments back to fiat right away. As the matter a fact, we HODL most of our profits and use it in with another merchant who accepts Bitcoin. Unfortunately, not all of our suppliers accept cryptocurrency payments, so when we pay our bills to them, we have to sell a portion of our BTC.

Lightning Network Integration

We are a store focused on Bitcoin. Our customers are tech-savvy Bitcoiners who genuinely believe in the future. As a store depending on Bitcoin and its community, we feel that the only way put our money where our mouth is and give an example to other stores. We are aware that the adoption of the Bitcoin depends on the merchants and as merchants, this is our way of spreading the adoption.

There’s something more we’d like to share. Currently, we’re working with a Lightning Network developer and helping him test the plugin in our live store. Due to the agreement with the developer, we will not share any detailed information about this, until we implement it.

Since the LN itself is still in alpha, we’re monitoring the development very carefully. We have done severe and extensive testing on the testnet, and we were able to process payments through the Lightning Network without problems.

We can’t give you the exact time frame when we will first release the LN interrogation in our store, but it will be soon, and it will be on the mainnet. This will be an experimental phase, so we’re working on ways to warn our customers about the potential risks involved.

BTCPay, like any open-source project, depends on the donations and community feedback and support. If you have any feedback regarding the checkout in our online store experience or if you experience any difficulties while using it in our store, please contact us.