Topic: Interesting conversation with a retailer who formerly accepted Bitcoin - page 4. (Read 20167 times)

I could not figure out how to make the mt. gox checkout button dynamic... When creating the button you have to put in a value... even if you change that value in the code they give you, once the customer clicks the button and goes to mtgox site the original amount shows back up again. This makes the button useless for shopping carts with different values at checkout.

That's cool that as you hover over the button it updates price as market changes. Now if I could just think of a great idea that hasn't been done already...

Some do this already.  With Mt. Gox, it is "autosell":
 - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/MtGox/API/HTTP/v1#Merchant_System

Also, the Checkout Buttons for Mt. Gox have a checkbox where you can indicate that you would like autosell (to have the bitcoins sold at market to USDs).  Here's a site using that -- see the "site-wide pass" at the bottom:

 - http://chipcollection.com/webstore/ordering.html

Couldn't some of these problems be easily worked around if the popular exchanges offered an API that generated send-to addresses that would auto-sell at market? For low volume simple cases anyway.

eg. You put an image in your shopping cart that is generated from such an exchange API call. It says "Send 1.05BTC to 1ze656..etc" and that address is linked as "auto-sell" to your exchange account. And ideally the exchange sends a confirm email.

Now when a buyer sends that BTC there the merchant simply checks his exchange account that the USD were received, or believes the email confirm, and approves the sale.

Sure, it's somewhat manual but it's a simple feature that could help many low volume merchants accept BTC when they can't get full cart integration. And it improves liquidity for the exchange offering it as it will bring in trades at current market price.

eg. is all the merchant needs to add much like a paypal button. The image gives amount in btc and address. The exchange tags that address as "auto-sell at market to this acctcode". It's a "magic address". Magic Computer Money should have magic addresses.

I just ordered an ounce of Earl Grey Vintage.

edit - although I just see that vintage isn't what I thought. I assumed vintage meant classic, tea and bergamot, not rose. I'll give it a try though, my next order will be bigger.

So was mine...


Also the transaction went through! Thanks to Chris Koss for taking the plunge and being the first person to try the new system!

What are you talking about dude? It was a joke, I only changed my post's title nothing more, sorry about not being specific about it.

Btw, good luck with the bitcoin sales  will be recommending you to anyone who has an interest buying tea online, cheers

I for one welcome our new grammatically correct (I mean incorrect, no wait... correct) topic overlords... 

Hmm, please do write the correct form so I can fix it. I can't stress enough that here in Spain they don't teach the English language extensively

Edit: Found the error and fixed it  

^ fixed the title for you  


60-90 minutes on average, they require 6 confirm to credit your account


A confirm means any subsequent bitcoin blocks, including the first one where the transaction got signed by a miner, and by protocol they are produced, on average, every 10 minutes.

Depends on the exchange. The general rule is 10 minutes for each confirmation. So, for bitfloor that's about an hour. There's a fair amount of variance however, so realistically it's more in the 0:30 - 2:00 hour time frame.

-bgc

Thanks for placing the order, and helping me test out the system. It has not come into bitfloor yet... how long do these things usually take?

Awesome! Just placed an order for your Jasmine pearls and mango mate.  Can't wait to try them :-)

I might have to try this out tomorrow. Happy to have a quick look at grabbing an exchange rate via javascript too if you like. Will PM...

David, did you contact Paysius about writing a shopping cart plguin that supports your current shopping cart?

Yup! Glad I could help.

Great! and since you can change a url with java-script, i can dynamically put in the price in dollars!

Nmteaco - being an accountant myself, I completely understand your concerns regarding the extra accounting headaches that accepting Bitcoin creates.  I think this is, and will continue to be for a long time yet, a major hurdle in the effort to get legitimate and already-existing businesses to accept Bitcoin directly.

Bit-pay is an awesome service, but doesn't really offer enough of a discount compared to credit cards to make a compelling reason to accept yet another payment method for most merchants.  I know the pain of reconciling credit card deposits into a single bank account from multiple payment methods, and adding another isn't something I would want to do without good reason.  So, even though they give you direct ACH deposits daily, which can be reconciled with sales just the same as payments made with credit cards, it's still one more thing to deal with.

That said, hopefully, we will continue to see improvements in integration with existing systems (shopping cart plugins, etc) that will make accounting and reconciliations much easier.

I think the biggest reason a merchant should accept Bitcoin NOW is not because of the lack of chargebacks, or the "lower" fees, but because in most cases, they will suddenly become the go-to merchant for a group of 10,000+ people who need that particular item.  In this case, if anyone here wants to buy some tea, they are now more likely to order it from you than they were before.  I don't know what your margin is, but bringing in extra sales is usually much more significant than saving half a percent of fees on a few transactions you would have already made.  So then, don't think of it as saving extra on fees - think of it as bringing in extra sales with a little more work.

Hey, david... I have an idea that may help, at least a little, with the exchange rate:
BTCTicker has an image that calculates any exchange rate (using MTGox) for you for example:

http://btcticker.appspot.com/mtgox/1.00btc2usd.png
is


and let's say you sell $17 worth of tea:

You can now use bitcoins to checkout on our site....

It is not an ideal solution at all, I have to set the exchange rate by hand every day in the code of the checkout page (I could not figure out how to pull the current price from another domain with javascript)... and everyone who orders will be sending their bitcoins to the same address... which in the other thread I was told could lead to fraud.

However I think people looking to cheat the system are not going to be spending their energy trying to get free tea. Also this is just a stop gap measure until a plugin for my cart is available.

So... just use the shopping cart as normal and when you get to the payment page select bitcoin as the payment method and you will be given instructions on the address to send the payment.

-David

(It would be nice if someone tests out the system.... if you want your bitcoins returned instead of the order just write that in the comments box (i think bitfloor might keep some of it) )