If you saw the post about STARE yesterday, you’ll see that we have a pretty serious merchant now accepting bitcoins side-by-side with Visa and Mastercard. STARE is using the bit-pay merchant tools that we've created. We believe bitcoin is a technological and social innovation that is rarely seen in human history and want to see bitcoin succeed. We are excited to be a part of it and hope to contribute to its success.
Our goal at bit-pay is to enable online merchants to accept bitcoins just as easily as they accept payments from Paypal, Visa, or Mastercard. That is a tall order given where the bitcoin technology is today, relative to the others, but we hope to be a major part of the innovation that moves bitcoin forward.
Tony at STARE had a lot of input into the design and layout of bit-pay, so it is designed from a merchants perspective. We hope that helps us achieve our objective of making it easy for merchants.
One of the big benefits is that we allow merchants to set their prices, or their shopping cart total, in their local currency (USD, EUR, etc). This can insulate the merchants from the volatile bitcoin exchange rates. After the buyer pays with the appropriate amount of bitcoins, the merchant has a choice. They can either accept the bitcoins, or have us convert this for them and pay them in USD. There’s a little delay and additional fee for USD payouts, but we think that’s probably ok.
So actually, if a merchant sets their prices in US Dollars, and wants to receive US Dollars, the merchant doesn’t have to know anything about bitcoins at all. It is invisible to them. They get paid with bit-pay just like they get paid from Paypal, Visa, or Mastercard. We think this is the real breakthrough that can take bitcoins out of the “bitcoin economy” and bust into the ‘real economy”.
We put together a video on our site, check it out and let us know your feedback. There is also a newsletter you can sign up to that will keep you informed of our progress.
https://bit-pay.com If you want to try bit-pay for yourself, head to STARE and make a purchase. The July issue is $9.95, or about 0.65 BTC.
http://www.staremagazine.com/Issue.asp?IssueID=115