If you run a website, accepting bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies as payment is a great way to attract new customers and boost your revenue. Here are four tips for getting started:

  1. Get familiar with the different types of cryptocurrency wallets. There are many different types of cryptocurrency wallets, and each has its own features and benefits. Some popular wallets include Coinbase, BitPay, and BitCoin Core. Make sure you choose the right one for your needs.
  2. Set up a payment gateway. A payment gateway is a service that allows you to accept bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies as payment on your website. There are many different providers available, so it’s important to find one that meets your specific needs. Some popular providers include BitPay and Coinbase Commerce.
  3. Choose the right price point for your cryptocurrency payments. You don’t want to overprice your payments in order to attract customers, but you also don’t want to underprice them either – setting the right price point can be tricky! Try using a price calculator like CoinMarketCap to get an idea of what prices are appropriate for your audience and situation.
  4. Promote your new payment option! Make sure you prominently display information about how customers can pay with bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies on your website homepage, in the footer, or anywhere else that might be useful (like product pages). You can also create helpful guides like this one on how to accept bitcoin payments on WordPress websites ..

How Does This Work?

Technically, you don’t need any sort of integration on your website. Cryptocurrencies aren’t like credit cards. They’re actually more like digital cash and have built-in payment and wallet systems. So, you could just have people send payments directly to your wallet, similar to paying in cash at a brick-and-mortar store.

However, that’s messy, and it would be nicer to have a complete checkout system easily integrated on your site so that users can check out quickly and receive their products immediately. There are a couple of cryptocurrency payment processors that you can integrate on your site. Coinbase is the most popular, although there are others, like CoinPayments and BitPay.

Using these payment processors, you can create checkout pages that integrate with your existing systems. If you’re using a platform that supports these directly, like Shopify and WooCommerce, you’ll simply need to link them. Otherwise, you’ll need to use a processor’s API directly.

Using Shopify

If you’re using Shopify, one of the biggest platforms for e-commerce, you’re in luck, because cryptocurrency has first-class support on the platform. Shopify supports many alternative payment methods, including Coinbase and a few other crypto processors.

If you’re not using Shopify but are looking to build an e-commerce website, we recommend it anyway for its ease of use.

Head over to the Settings at the bottom left of your store dashboard and click “Payments.”

Then, select “Alternate Payment Providers” and search for Coinbase.

You’ll then need to enter your Coinbase email and API key, which you can find at Settings > API. After that, users will be able to use Coinbase in addition to other payment providers that you support.

Shopify doesn’t just support cryptocurrency payments, of course—you can use them to accept credit card payments on your website.

Using WooCommerce for WordPress

WooCommerce is a popular plugin for selling products from WordPress sites and has integrations with Coinbase. You’ll need to install the Coinbase Commerce Payment Gateway plugin from the WordPress marketplace.

Then, under WooCommerce > Settings > Payments, you’ll need to enable it. And next, under Manage, you’ll need to configure the plugin.

This panel needs two things from you—your Coinbase API key and the “Webhook Shared Secret,” which Coinbase uses to message WordPress. You’ll need to add an endpoint from the Coinbase webhook subscriptions page and copy the shared secret into the box.

Using Coinbase Payments

Coinbase, much like PayPal, supports embeddable buttons that you can add on your website. If you’re looking for a more advanced integration, though, you’ll need to use their API directly.

Head over to the Coinbase Commerce Dashboard and select “create a checkout.” Enter your product information, description, and price, and then upload an image.

Then, you’ll get an embeddable checkout button or a link to a checkout page.

By itself, this is just a button through which to send cash. If you want to automatically do something after the payment is complete, you’ll need to register a callback function.

Which will be called with the following event object:

{ buttonId: “unique id for this embeddable button”, code: CHARGE_CODE, event: “charge_failed” OR “charge_confirmed” OR “payment_detected” }

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