Topic: The Best Way To Encourage Offline Store To Accept BTC - page 5. (Read 2623 times)

i have done this a few times and had various success and failures.
here is some advice.

1. ensure you are living in an area where there are many bitcoiners
2. ensure the retailer you pick is sells a product/service/food/beverage, that bitcoiners would use regularly
3. its normally best if your introducing it. that at first you become the retailers exchanger by setting up a prepaid bartab. enough to cover a few weeks of transactions, and handing the retailer more fiat as the total gets to the limit each week/fortnight

i mention this because if the retailer only gets one customer a month. its not worth the hassle for the retailer, even if you were to explain bitpay/coinbase as oppose to direct prepaid bartab method.

the best success is using a bar/restaurant where you and a group would have regular bitcoin meetups at.(emphasis: actual real bitcoin customers regularly) where in the beginning it is more of a gimmick to train staff to ask for 0.XX BTC (i say gimmick because they know they already have $£ in the bartab).. but thats just a zero loss confidence giver to the retailer to atleast try it and learn it at first.

but as soon as they know how to show a QR code and mention how much BTC the beer/meal will be, you can do things more official like getting them to set up their own bitpay/coinbase account at 0% fee(for small local retailers doing under 30 tx a month.) as oppose to visa/mastercard which is upto 2.5%

You are truly amazing and quite intelligent. Maybe this way is one of the things that can make all the people who use the bitcoin's getting excited and all those who have not known a bitcoin will use it. But I see this is not enough, because fruition if this works then it will only help users bitcoin and only a small percentage will increase user bitcoin. However this is not a problem because this can be very helpful for us

Once bitcoin transactions become instant, this will be a possibility. but having to wait anywhere from 15 mins to 4 hours for confirmations makes it impossible.
They could use bitcoin for online services, like reservations or something like that though. or maybe some sort of "pre paid" meal where you pay online before actually ordering at the restaurant?

Just ask the stores to accept zero confirmation and use 3rd party services such as BitPay if necessary.
Or wait till bitcoin network ready to handle more transaction before we encourage more shops to accept bitcoin.

How about no? If the manager or everybody that works on the store doesn't know anything about bitcoin, then that would be a lot of work to someone who would be assigned to make their store accept bitcoins. You can do stuffs like persuading/manipulating/convincing the manager to accept bitcoin but it's actually bugging me off because there's a lot of work that should be done before the whole thing could be implemented on their store.

Bitcoin isn't like a product that you could introduce to someone and if they liked it, you would just give it to them or sell it to them and then they can use it right after. You have to understand the whole bitcoin thing before you could actually use it on your store as a mode of payment.

This would be very hard as I think only a small proportion of their customers are likely to use Bitcoin let alone know what it is. Maybe in the future this might be more likely but I don't think it's worth them accepting bitcoins just yet

The best way is to introduce bitcoin to them. Teach them what is bitcoin and how is transactions are done. Teach them how the price inflates and deflates. Teach them how it can help their business.
Encouragement is useless if the store owner is not well versed with bitcoin, its operations, nature and transactions. It could only work if they know and understand what it is all about.

And then clients need to wait 6 hours for transaction to confirm because network can't handle all transactions.

Bitcoin is not to be used in that way.

This can be challeging but, i have tried the strategy below:

walk into any offline store i.e (restaurant) and ask one of the staff that you will like to speak with the  the management of the restaurant.

Most people will direct you straight to the management, other's might want to know the reason behind such request.

just be prepare for follow-up response;

If, you are given the opportunity, open your presentation in this manner;

I'm interested in promoting your services/product's on bitcoin related forum!
Do you know you'll be losing 35%-45% of your customer's (tourist) who  uses bitcoins?

At this point be prepared to tell them more about bitcoin.

Close your presentation, try to be brief as possible.

Remember to make reference to bitcointalk forum, because it offer's more information  (foundation) with comprehensive lesson about bitcoin & the use of bitcoin.

Creation & distribution of short flyer's with same message will work fine for those who dislike meeting one-one with the management of offline stores.


Thanks
Bitcseo