Every imaginable niche in online shopping is highly competitive, so anything you can do to help your eCommerce store stand out is a net positive. Enabling cryptocurrency payments opens doors to a growing customer base that loves to support businesses that embrace this emerging technology.
Below, we walk you through how to accept crypto payments on your eCommerce website, from adding payment options to managing your crypto wallet. It’s everything you need to join the growing crypto economy.
The Challenges of Accepting Crypto
The unknown can be unnerving when implementing any new site feature. With cryptocurrency, you’re talking about integrating an entirely new technology.
People worry about the potential hurdles they might face when setting up crypto for a complex eCommerce website. They’re nervous about the legalities involved in accepting cryptocurrencies, what they are allowed to do with their earnings, and what regulations are involved.
Don’t worry—there’s good news ahead: All the hurdles involved have easy-to-integrate solutions. The world is slowly coming around to crypto, but the infrastructure is in place and ready to scale.
Before we get into specifics about how to accept crypto payments for eCommerce, here are a few questions to consider:
- What cryptocurrencies do you want to accept?
- What questions can you answer for your customers in an FAQ?
- Do you want to convert your crypto to fiat (US dollars) automatically?
- Do you want to hold on to some of your crypto payments?
How Do I Accept Crypto Payments on My Website?
Adding crypto payment options to your eCommerce website is a natural fit. Since people have grown accustomed to shopping online, they’re used to making digital payments with credit and debit cards. It’s natural to expand into crypto, which has been described as the first real internet money.
Here are eight steps you’ll want to follow:
1. Select a Crypto Wallet
A crypto wallet is used to send and receive payments using your choice of cryptocurrencies. Most eCommerce business owners will want to open a crypto business account (see Step 2 below) that integrates with your website. Otherwise, customers will need your wallet’s address for each form of crypto you accept.
2. Choose Your Crypto Account
Most eCommerce website owners will turn to popular options like Coinbase Commerce or BitPay for their crypto business services. These platforms act as your crypto wallet, payment processor, and payment gateway.
These three distinct and vital elements enable you to accept crypto payments.
- Your crypto wallet is where crypto payments are received and stored. This is also where you can choose other actions like making conversions or withdrawing to another wallet.
- The payment gateway securely manages the crypto payment process, linking your website’s interface to the encrypted transmission of transaction data between the customer’s wallet and yours.
- The payment processor verifies blockchain processes and receives funds from the gateway. Depending on your settings, it can convert incoming funds or deposit them into your wallet in the same cryptocurrency.
Since a crypto account provides all three of these functions while integrating with your website, it’s worthwhile to research these platforms before taking a more technically challenging path like hiring a web developer or coder to implement the same features on your own.
3. Integrate Crypto with Your Website
Incorporating a new payment method requires complex coding from scratch, so most website owners integrate their crypto payments using preconfigured plugins or APIs.
Popular payment integration tools include:
- WooCommerce (WordPress plugin)
- Shopify
- Web Host Manager Complete Solution (WHMCS)
- Easy Digital Downloads (EDD)
- Magento 2
Since WordPress is the most widely used content management system (CMS), many website owners opt for WooCommerce’s plugin to connect their eCommerce site directly to their crypto account.
How to Accept Crypto Payments on WooCommerce
WooCommerce allows you to accept hundreds of digital currencies, connect to different wallets and business accounts, and develop invoicing routines. The WooCommerce cryptocurrency features page gives the full details.
Other Integration Solutions
If you want to dig deeper into more technical integration options, consider code library integration options that are available for:
- Java
- C# .NET
- PHP
- Node.js
This is only recommended for more advanced coders and developers, but it may be the direction you want to take if you need unique customizations to your eCommerce site. Along the same lines but slightly less advanced, you can use API integrations to implement commands into your account.
4. Set Up Your Preferences
With your eCommerce site fully integrated with your crypto account, you’re nearly ready to start taking crypto payments. Now’s the perfect time to get your settings and preferences in order, including important choices like:
- Deciding what cryptocurrencies you want to accept
- Choosing whether to convert payments into fiat or a stablecoin pegged to fiat
- Determining whether to keep some—or all—earnings in crypto
- Choosing whether to store earnings in your crypto account or withdraw them to your bank account or private crypto wallet
- Considering other conversion options like swapping one crypto for another
- Deciding whether to use crypto to pay for other business expenses like shipping
These choices are vital to your overall business strategy. Since many businesses want to add crypto payments because they believe in the importance of crypto and decentralized finance, they may have a plan for sustaining business operations and holding onto crypto payments despite market volatility. Others may balance this decision by holding some profits and exchanging the rest for fiat to stabilize earnings.
5. Test Your Settings
With all of your preferences and settings in place, it’s time to test your site and make sure that payments work, all options appear in your checkout cart, and payments interact correctly with your wallet. Be sure to test everything from your crypto account, not just payment checkouts, to ensure conversions and withdrawals of both fiat and crypto work as expected.
You may also want to give beta access to these new features to a small group of loyal users to collect any feedback that your team has missed.
6. Create an FAQ for Crypto Payments
There’s a good chance people will have questions before making their first purchase using crypto. Setting up an FAQ page to cover the basic questions is a way to get ahead of those concerns while promoting your new feature. Consider answering questions about how payments are sent, the basics of crypto wallets, and whether it costs more to buy with crypto (no—it doesn’t!).
Extra points for integrating the FAQs within the purchasing experience so users don’t have to leave their buying journey, potentially get side tracked and not return.
7. Go Live!
It’s time to tell the world you’re ready to take crypto payments and become part of the revolution! Be sure to announce the addition of crypto payments on your social media channels, email your customers.
A banner on the top of your website can also notify new and returning users that they can use crypto to purchase their goods.
8. Continuously Monitor
Are your payments live and working? Great! But don’t just assume all’s well. Be vigilant and make sure everything continues to work as expected over the days, weeks, and months to follow. As with your other technical settings and processes, you want to keep your site up-to-date with the latest security measures and plugin updates and make sure settings continue doing what you expect.
Additionally, keep an active line of communication open with your site visitors and make it easy for them to report any issues they are having.
Pay for Shipping with Your Crypto Profits
What will you do with crypto payments once you receive them? One option is to apply them to your business expenses.
Bitcoin Postage lets you use your cryptocurrency payments to pay for shipping and show your love for the entire crypto economy. You can transact directly on-chain from your crypto wallet—you don’t even have to create an account unless you want to.
Try it out today!