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As far as we can tell, and it's a lot more we can find on some exchange operations, Intersango has been good in it's dealings with customers. If you have any experience on that, good or bad, we would be interested in the feedback. This is still an area that we are learning about. The advantage with Intersango being in the UK we do understand what reglatory and business norms apply to businesses operating in our particular backyard.
Yohan,
is there a reason why you would not use existing merchant payment solution like provided by
bit-pay and
MtGox merchant solutions? AFAIK, they offer ready-to-use fully embedded services that ensure you to get the exact amount of money donominated in fiat for a convenient fee (less then CC companies usually charge). There is neither need for you to take currency risks at all nor for adding a margin on top of your prices.
From my personal experience with Intersango, I'd strongly suggest you to check their TOS and ask the staff explicitly if that would be possible. I tried to use Intersango for the payments of my boards around two months ago. At that times I could withdraw funds only to my own bank account, they lack the required licenses to wire money to a third party. Maybe they got the related licenses meanwhile, otherwise your outlined plan to accept BTC payments via Intersango as conversion proxy won't work. Another fact to consider is the low trading volume there. It took me almost a week to sell 1k BTC. Finally, as rjk mentioned, the management group behind Intersango lost quite some trust and reputation after the Bitcoinica debacle.
The biggest problem we have with choosing an exchange is that there is virtually no exchange of any size that hasn't had some sort of problem either with security or time to pay out going by forum postings. This partly of why we won't take large payments directly in Bitcoins as yet and our aim initially will be to convert to GBP/USD as fast as we can on receiving Bitcoins as a risk reduction strategy. In time that might be able to change because we are not operating on a wafer thin margin, as we are currently, or maybe even some of our suppliers take Bitcoins that mitigates the conversion risk a little. The latter I think is probably a few years away so basically we are left with the currency conversion risk that we have to manage.
The other side of taking this mitigation is that by say converting funds every day we could have very high bank transfer fees on a foreign based exchange e.g. MTgox. MTgox would be the logical place for exchange based on volume but when we looked for the sort of information we look for as general business due diligence it's either not available or simple somewhere we don't know where to look for MTgox. I can say the same about a lot of exchanges. Ther are a lot nice looking websites with very little information about the owners of them.
Overall we can see that Bitcoin is a good thing and there is a lot of nice things in it. From a business perspective the biggest issue is the lack of traceability. Again on the forum there are enough arguements about people having sent Bitcoins and the other side saying they didn't get them for us to be cautious. If we have missed something there do tell us. We are still learning about Bitcoins and things surrounding Bitcoins so there may be something here we don't know.
Many of these sorts of problems with dissappear as Bitcoin gets bigger. At the moment it's a chicken and egg situation in that Bitcoin needs more conventional businesses to take Bitcoins but conversely they either won't, or will only in limited way as we do, because other companies that trade with them don't and they have the same exchange rate risk we have.
On the second option we are open to people using other exchanges and sending us the money that way but the transfer fees are always going to have to be paid. If the exchange is UK and possibly EU based (using SEPA) it will probably be viable for smaller amounts. What we don't want to do is running a lot of accounts wih different exchanges ourselves as that is a huge admin issue.
Using merchant services like BitPay is a possibility but we simply are not ready to do that yet. We can run live currency conversion on our USD and Euro pricing that runs on our existing webshop but we don't because it is an administration nightmare because we have to account for everything in GBP to our taxation authorities. We simplify that by usually only changing USD/Euro exchange pricing conversion rates every 1-3 months and sometiimes longer. Doing the same in Bitcoins simply won't work unless we put a huge risk margin on Bitcoins which I am sure none of you want.
