BitCoin

[WolfStores]

Has anybody used the BitCoin for online transactions in connection with their online shop?
Any good or bad experiences to report?

 

[MartCactus]

We've been developing a bit coin integration for our shopping cart software.

We'll be accepting bitcoins too. I actually bought a load of bitcoins about 18 months back - so its been a wild ride watching their value go up and down.

Points to consider if you're going to sell in Bitcoins

- the price is very very volatile, especially at present. So you'll almost certainly want to price your products in pounds or dollars or whatever and then enable the customer to switch it to bitcoins at the checkout.
- since the price is so volatile you'd have to insist that customer made payment in bitcoins within eg 1 hour, else they could wait one day and see whether the price had moved in their favour
- similarly, due to volatility you probably won't want to be holding too many bitcoins if you think they may fall in value... so you'll need to cash them out quickly
- its easier to use some form of online wallet provider to handle the payments rather than hold your own bitcoin wallet - but then you're relying on the security of that provider, and there have been some notable hacks in the history of bitcoins
- if you do hold the wallet on your own server you'll want to automate it to send bitcoins automatically to a safer wallet (an offline one) or to send them somewhere to convert to GBP or USD eg every hour or so. You wouldn't want to risk having large amounts of what is essentially cash sitting on your server, just in case.
- bitcoin transactions can't be charged back - as a merchant that is a good thing, but customers might not be so keen on it
- bitcoin transactions aren't approved in real time - generally confirmations build up every 10 minutes, with each 10 minutes making the transaction even more irreversible (compare with credit cards where you can suffer a chargeback after months).

I think its a great system, and I'm convinced it will change the world as much as the advent of the world wide web did, but at present the price volatility makes it quite impractical to use them for real transactions, which is a shame. I think eventually things will settle down, the speculation will stop and they will become a very useful opportunity for businesses.

 

[DPearce]

I would wait until the value become more stable, until then don't pour your money into trying to accomodate BitCoin.

 

[edmondscommerce]

Exactly when that will be though is the question..

Huge crash yesterday, I suspect a few people lost a fair bit of cash

 

[DPearce]

Very true, I saw it drop over $100 per coin, or something crazy.

Still, if only we jumped on the BitCoin bandwagon a couple years ago at 20cents a pop, eh?

 

[edmondscommerce]

yep too right

 

[MartCactus]

I bought my bitcoins at about 5 dollars. Sold a few during this rush (more than enough to cover my initial outlay) but I think I will sell some more as I suspect price has further to come down. I plan on buying them back once market has settled down again.

As I said, I think its a great technology and IS the future. But just like the dotcom boom people get carried away and it creates these silly valuations.

I definitely think it is worth people playing around with them at this stage. We want to be at the cutting edge of ecommerce - and bitcoins are certainly that!

 

[MASSEY]

I saw a guy talking about how they rose astronomically from the original price. It is all very odd to me. It looks unstable and risky. Why would a retailer want to bother with them? Surely you'll only get one order a year from someone using bit coins :| or are they more popular.

 

[MartCactus]

I saw a guy talking about how they rose astronomically from the original price. It is all very odd to me. It looks unstable and risky. Why would a retailer want to bother with them? Surely you'll only get one order a year from someone using bit coins :| or are they more popular.

I remember the early days of the web. I was working for a very early dotcom in the UK in late 95 and people would say "why bother having a website, when no one can see it?". It was a fair point at the time.

At present what you say is correct. But just like the world wide web and email, bitcoins offer something new and useful over what is currently possible

- they enable people to (in effect) send money directly to eachother, no middle man, no paypal putting a hold on the account, no ban on visa handling gambling transactions etc
- they are anonymous, especially useful for purchases of services where you don't need them physically shipped
- no chargebacks, so attractive to merchants, especially in high fraud industries like porn, gambling, and probably quite a few less controversial ones

Presently we take methods designed to be used offline and apply them online (eg credit cards etc). Bitcoin is designed with online in mind (though there are interesting projects to enable it to be used in shops etc)

But as I outlined in my initial post in this thread, yes the volatility is a risk, and it does make their use more problematic at present. With the integration in our software we'll enable merchants to continue to price in USD or GBP or whatever, and then use a live rate lookup to enable them to flip to a Bitcoin rate at the checkout, valid for perhaps 1 hour or so.

 

[edmondscommerce]

for the curious there are already some payment gateway integrations that would allow you to take bitcoin, eg:

https://bitpay.com/bitcoin-shopping-cart-plugins

 

[MartCactus]

for the curious there are already some payment gateway integrations that would allow you to take bitcoin, eg:

https://bitpay.com/bitcoin-shopping-cart-plugins

Bitpay isn't a pure bitcoin integration... essentially its an online system, so the integrations listed there are with Bitpay rather than directly with bitcoin. I imagine there are integrations available for Magento etc to work directly with bitcoin.

The real attraction of bitcoins is that rather than using a third party service like Bitpay you can host the bitcoin client software yourself... so you would have a bitcoin daemon running on your server and your shopping cart would talk directly to that via JSON. And in this case you don't have to pay commission to bitpay or anyone else, and aren't subject to any rules etc that they might impose (eg re identifying yourself - which may be an issue for some sites operating in the shadier industries)

 

[WolfStores]

for the curious there are already some payment gateway integrations that would allow you to take bitcoin, eg:

https://bitpay.com/bitcoin-shopping-cart-plugins

Thank you for the link
Have you tried out the Prestashop addon? Has it worked for you?

Cheers,

Tim

 

[WolfStores]

Bitpay isn't a pure bitcoin integration... essentially its an online system, so the integrations listed there are with Bitpay rather than directly with bitcoin. I imagine there are integrations available for Magento etc to work directly with bitcoin.

The real attraction of bitcoins is that rather than using a third party service like Bitpay you can host the bitcoin client software yourself... so you would have a bitcoin daemon running on your server and your shopping cart would talk directly to that via JSON. And in this case you don't have to pay commission to bitpay or anyone else, and aren't subject to any rules etc that they might impose (eg re identifying yourself - which may be an issue for some sites operating in the shadier industries)

I am really glad that my simple question has developed into this useful, long thread
Have you done any work with Prestashop? I agree that taking bitcoins directly rather than via a 3rd party would be much better as this would make it even more attractive to online shop owners.
The whole idea behind the BitCoin was to facilitate online transactions at very low or even at zero cost. It is a real pity that speculators jumped on the bandwagon and made its value shoot through the roof. In my opinion, ideally its exchange rate should have been fixed against one of the major currencies e.g. the US$ or the GBP, to avoid these huge fluctuations in its value.
And I agree with you. I think that the BitCoin or a similar form of an online, virtual currency, is the future

Cheers,

Tim

 

[owas]

I have been following this Bitcoin for some while now, but I really don't see it as the next big thing, although it be great if it was. My understanding is that its basiclay an alternative to the banking system, but it poses many risks, even yeasterday there was a massive attack which saw shares drop, and some even had there currency (wallet) emptied.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=173227.0

 

[markttt]

For those who still don't know what is the cheapest way to buy bitcoins, this is my experience. I wanted to buy Bitcoins here, in the UK, directly without intermediators on ebay or other middle men (because fees are huge), and I found it very difficult, so I made this guide:

howtogetbitcoinsuk.blogspot.co.uk

 

[WolfStores]

For those who still don't know what is the cheapest way to buy bitcoins, this is my experience. I wanted to buy Bitcoins here, in the UK, directly without intermediators on ebay or other middle men (because fees are huge), and I found it very difficult, so I made this guide:

howtogetbitcoinsuk.blogspot.co.uk

Thank you for the info and useful link. But still the process you describe is very elaborate

Could anybody else suggest any better, faster, or even cheaper ways to buy BitCoins?

Cheers,

Tim

 

[8420PR]

1 BitCoin is being talked up as reaching $100,000 by 2015, so as far as I can see it is mainly being used as an investment as opposed to a currency for day-to-day transactions at the moment (and I don't think this will change).

Also, as mentioned, it is incredibly complex - you have to be very computer savvy to use it at the moment, and also very risky.

 

[MartCactus]

I am really glad that my simple question has developed into this useful, long thread
Have you done any work with Prestashop? I agree that taking bitcoins directly rather than via a 3rd party would be much better as this would make it even more attractive to online shop owners.
The whole idea behind the BitCoin was to facilitate online transactions at very low or even at zero cost. It is a real pity that speculators jumped on the bandwagon and made its value shoot through the roof. In my opinion, ideally its exchange rate should have been fixed against one of the major currencies e.g. the US$ or the GBP, to avoid these huge fluctuations in its value.
And I agree with you. I think that the BitCoin or a similar form of an online, virtual currency, is the future

Cheers,

Tim

Sorry for late reply, haven't logged in here for a few days.

We've not worked with Prestashop... we're an asp.net developer and produce an open source asp.net shopping cart (see my footer link) which is pretty well known in asp.net circles. We've created a bitcoin integration for this... it talks directly to the bitcoin software so doesn't rely on bitpay or similar.

Fixing Bitcoin's value to a pound or a dollar would defeat the whole purpose of the currency... it is designed to be a currency in its own right. In many ways the fixed amount of bitcoins that will be created is deliberate. Its a reaction to the unlimited watering down of savings that today's central banks are undertaking. It also encourages early adopters - if bitcoins take off, the value of them must go up.

Eventually market forces will intervene and bitcoins will find a proper market value... but that could take a few years and it will be a bumpy ride until that happens.