What is the reason behind the surge of merchants accepting Bitcoin in 2014? - page 2.

jbreher

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Quote from: lucasjkr on March 25, 2015, 12:35:18 PM

if you brought up Bitcoin to overstock in 2011, they likely would have expressed zero interest.

I don't think that is true. Patrick Byrne (CEO) has been highly critical of the legacy financial system for some time. I think if he were aware of Bitcoin earlier, he would have jumped in earlier. Yes, just MNSHO.

Kprawn

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Most companies like BitPay and Coinbase only started to make serious transactions in early 2014. After they announced their first $1 million single transaction, some bigger companies sat up and took notice.

When Dell / NewEgg / Microsoft jumped on board the smaller merchants followed suit and things just grew from there. Wink

Coinbase & BitPay also actively recruited new merchants for Bitcoin adoption and made it easy for merchants to accept BTC and convert it to fiat. {The debate it open, if that is good or bad for BTC} Huh

kolloh

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I think it give the flexibility of additional payment methods which can be cheaper on fees. Its also a lot more secure than putting your credit card out online which is a great benefit for purchasers.

Though it is interesting how Mozilla was struggling to find how to add bitcoin as a payment method for donations on Mozilla without causing a negative effect: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2oofby/results_of_first_17_days_of_mozilla_bitcoin/

Mr.K

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There are a lot of reasons that the big merchants and small stores integrated with Bitcoin,but i think the most important one might be accept Bitcoin helps to promote their businesses.

RTRC

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Quote from: Gyfts on March 25, 2015, 08:57:58 PM

I would have to disagree. The companies mentioned above that began to take Bitcoin as payment probably had no interest in Bitcoin themselves nor did they particularly care about increasing their sales through the currency. Many of their customers I'm sure do not use Bitcoin as a payment option because paying in fiat is just as easy as paying in Bitcoin to major, secure, retailers. It probably did end up costing them some money to cut a deal with Bitpay or whoever their 3rd party exchange was. They may take a percentage of each sale, or something kind of fee. The reason I see many companies taking Bitcoin is for fraud. With Bitcoin, a company can't be held liable for fraud or chargebacks as often paying with fiat. That, or maybe it was a domino effect after Overstock.com started to accept Bitcoin.

Not true. The CEO of Overstock has millions invested into BTC.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/02/21/for-overstock-ceo-bitcoin-isnt-just-a-publicity-stunt/

Don't forget that paying in fiat online usually involves a credit/debit card. Visa/American express/exc charge fees everytime their card is used. Depending on which fee is greater, bitpay may be a cheaper option than accepting cards.

ajareselde

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Satoshi is rolling in his grave. #bitcoin

I believe the reason for merchant growth is based on the fact that transactions made are cheaper for them than the other ones in play (credit card payments,checks etc)
there is almost no transfer fee, and the transactions are not reversible, its basically everything merchants want in their business.
The bitcoin merchant adoption is still quite low however, i believe it is yet to be spread out to the majority, and since good word goes long and fast, i believe its going to happen very soon.

cheers

Gyfts

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Quote from: countryfree on March 25, 2015, 10:20:43 AM

Merchants just want more sales. If BTC can bring more business, it's good. Besides, I guess it's quite fashionable too, and it doesn't cost much to implement, so let's do it.

I would have to disagree. The companies mentioned above that began to take Bitcoin as payment probably had no interest in Bitcoin themselves nor did they particularly care about increasing their sales through the currency. Many of their customers I'm sure do not use Bitcoin as a payment option because paying in fiat is just as easy as paying in Bitcoin to major, secure, retailers. It probably did end up costing them some money to cut a deal with Bitpay or whoever their 3rd party exchange was. They may take a percentage of each sale, or something kind of fee. The reason I see many companies taking Bitcoin is for fraud. With Bitcoin, a company can't be held liable for fraud or chargebacks as often paying with fiat. That, or maybe it was a domino effect after Overstock.com started to accept Bitcoin.

gentlemand

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Welt Am Draht

Quote from: lucasjkr on March 25, 2015, 12:35:18 PM

I wonder how much longer many of those companies will continue accepting bitcoin for, actually.

A fair few have fallen by the wayside already. Wordpress seem to have quietly dropped it citing 'confusion' among too many payments options. I've read a few accounts on Reddit from mom and pop type operations who dropped it mainly because they were sick of explaining it to curious people.

I think it's going to be a top down deal. Merchants will have to compel people to use it rather than sit back and let them roll in and not many could be arsed to do that. Overstock seems to be the most committed by a long way but you had deep discounts from Newegg for a while.

randy8777

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it's not only publicity, but it is also much better and safer than other payment options.
it's a first step in the right direction.

jjacob

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★Nitrogensports.eu★

They found out it is great publicity, no risk (because of payment processors) and probably doesn't cost much to implement.
Whenever a company decided to accept Bitcoin, it definitely stayed in the news for a few days.

dhimasnk

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I do not know, hopefully in 2015 will also be a lot of companies are using bitcoin as a payment system, as well as utilizing bitcoin as a main job

lucasjkr

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I doubt that Overstock received a huge increase in sales due to BTC acceptance.

IT doesn't matter when Bitpay and Coinbase were founded, BTC wasn't seeming like it was reaching a critical mass until 2014. In other words, if you brought up Bitcoin to overstock in 2011, they likely would have expressed zero interest.

I think many companies moved to start accepting Bitcoin in 2014 because there they saw it in the news, they saw legitimate finance people talking about it, AND they probably discounted the number of "hodlers" that were out there... They probably moved to accept Bitpay thinking that people with Bitcoins were eager to spend them, much generally doesn't seem to be the case. Not even to spend them if only to re-up a few minutes later.

I wonder how much longer many of those companies will continue accepting bitcoin for, actually.

manselr

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Quote from: maku on March 25, 2015, 12:22:21 PM

Quote from: Lorenzo on March 25, 2015, 07:06:19 AM

-snip-

What do you think? Do you think this the only reason or are there other factors at play? And now that accepting Bitcoin is no longer viewed as "groundbreaking" as it used to be, do you think the trend of ever-increasing merchant adoption will continue into 2015 and the coming years or have we reached a plateau?

Of course not. We are far from reaching limit of retailers and companies accepting bitcoin. That is for sure. That list you presented was just an introductory example. I predict that if some really big fish will accept bitcoin i.e. Walmart or Amazon we would be seeing domino effect on a large scale.

I don't understand the notion of of "limit of retailers". Why does it have to be a limit of retailers anyway? every person in the world could accept Bitcoin in their business if they wanted to.

maku

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Quote from: Lorenzo on March 25, 2015, 07:06:19 AM

-snip-

What do you think? Do you think this the only reason or are there other factors at play? And now that accepting Bitcoin is no longer viewed as "groundbreaking" as it used to be, do you think the trend of ever-increasing merchant adoption will continue into 2015 and the coming years or have we reached a plateau?

Of course not. We are far from reaching limit of retailers and companies accepting bitcoin. That is for sure. That list you presented was just an introductory example. I predict that if some really big fish will accept bitcoin i.e. Walmart or Amazon we would be seeing domino effect on a large scale.

oblivi

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They may have intelligent people on their ID departments which noticed Bitcoin and thought it would be dumb to not be pioneers into the future. Plus it takes literally 0 effort to accept.

ajaxmoor

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I would say it is probably to expand their customer base and save money on payment processing companies. Back in 2013 and before bitcoin wasn't too booming, and now after the wide adoption, people with bitcoin would tend to use their services and products and would use bitcoin to pay.

ebliever

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I think the obvious reason was that in late 2013 the price of bitcoin rose to over $1000 USD, making it a big deal in the headlines and capturing a lot of attention. That translated into companies taking a couple months to look at it and figure out how to implement acceptance of bitcoins, which has been proceeding since then.

Unfortunately they've been very short-sighted about it and used "We accept bitcoins" as a cheap marketing ploy, rather than demonstrating a serious commitment to it. If they were serious they'd have shared the cost savings of using bitcoin with their customer base, giving customers an actual reason to use bitcoin.

Instead, with companies that accept bitcoin I now have a choice:
1. Pay with bitcoin and get zero discount. The merchant gets all the benefits - immediate payment, no counterfeiting, bounced checks, chargebacks, armored car costs, etc. But customers have little incentive to use bitcoin with them.
2. Pay with credit card. This gets me a 2% discount (minimum) due to the rewards cards I universally use. I don't actually pay from my bank account for 30-50 days following the transaction. I can jerk the merchant around with a chargeback if I wanted. The merchant pays 3% or more in fees.

Merchants, you are doing it wrong.

ScreamnShout

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Yes it seems like a trendy alternative and there is already apps that can take payments for it so very easy to access.

countryfree

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Your country may be your worst enemy

Merchants just want more sales. If BTC can bring more business, it's good. Besides, I guess it's quite fashionable too, and it doesn't cost much to implement, so let's do it.

Lorenzo

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Quote from: MGMT on March 25, 2015, 08:26:07 AM

I think it's just a natural progression, but I think there was a disappointing number of big companies getting involved both last and this year. I think the adoption rate will pick up at some point (hopefully) but it's been very slow in my opinion. I think there's much more smaller companies adopting bitcoin and those are just as important in my opinion so we shouldn't forget them.

It's probably too early to know if this year will be a good or bad one for merchant adoption but I'm curious to know why you think 2014 was a disappointing year for merchant adoption? Remember that no mainstream retailer was even remotely interested in accepting BTC before Overstock did so in January 2014 and since then about a dozen other large established companies have started accepting payments in BTC. Or are you referring to the fact that all of these companies currently use a service like BitPay and don't directly handle the coins themselves? That's understandably quite disappointing but I can definitely understand their reasons for doing so. After all, businesses have expenses to pay and 99% of the time these must be paid using fiat currencies.

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