We are occasionally asked to develop e-commerce websites for our clients – often as part of a wider Digital Marketing strategy that we’ve helped to put into motion. We always enjoy working on new projects, however I’m going to be very honest here… whenever the team hear the words ‘e-commerce website’, those words are often met with mixed emotions; Excitement stirs from the Design team tasked with rising to a new challenge, the Marketing team rub their hands together in anticipation of those sweet sweet statistics they’ll be able to analyse and the Accounts team would be furiously writing congratulatory emails to everyone involved, if they weren’t all tied up in project meetings most of the day.
The tech team however, often simply turn the volume up and pretend they didn’t just hear those two words.
Building good, solid and well designed websites can be quite difficult. Building good, solid e-commerce websites, provides an extra layer of complexity when it comes to the development process. Aside from ensuring the design is great and on brand, the user experience is flawless and the site works well across all devices; which all require great skill and in-depth planning to get right, the technical details of actually taking payments online and the associated security concerns, can be very difficult and costly to implement, for both us and our clients.
We steer well clear of any job that entails storing or processing credit card information on the server, as this brings with it miles and miles of red tape, concerned bankers and stern looking people regularly auditing your entire codebase and network setup. We’re happy to leave this to the experts in that field (bank systems and large institutions, primarily).
Traditional online payment methods
The primary method our clients use to take payment online involves utilising an existing merchant account they have with their banks and using this in conjunction with a third party payment processing gateway such as Sagepay or Worldpay. These companies are well established payment processors and are trusted by millions around the world, yet can still be difficult to implement, often come with a high monthly fee and always take a percentage of your every sale.
The secondary method we have used in the past (for smaller online businesses) is to use an established service such as Paypal or Google Checkout to handle payment processing. These services are great for taking the hassle out of it all; you can generally just ‘plug and play’ if you want to get up and running quickly. However, the plug and play versions of the gateways will usually interrupt the user flow of your customer and redirect them away from your site to complete payment externally – which isn’t optimal for conversion or even particularly professional.
These types of gateways generally cost even more than the primary method listed above. Typically anywhere between 1.4% (for payments received in excess of £55k), to a massive 3.4% for transactions between 0-£1.5k. And that’s not including the obligatory extra per-transaction cost on top.
Enter Bitcoin.
If you ever read the news, you’ll have quite possibly heard of Bitcoin over the last year or two. It is a digital currency of the modern web, that uses peer-to-peer technology to enable fast transfer of value between two parties. No banks, no middle men, no high fees and no fuss. It’s essentially digital cash.
There are a number of benefits of accepting Bitcoin for your business:
Number one is that the fees are generally much lower.
A fee for sending Bitcoin is still required in order to compensate the network of miners who are processing transactions around the world – but this is typically only 0.0001btc (which is around 3 pence at the time of writing). Receiving Bitcoin is free.
It costs the same amount to send £10 million, as it does to send £10. 3 British pennies.
Another benefit is that due to the decentralised nature of the Bitcoin ecosystem, any payments made are final and are not able to be reversed. There is no such thing as a ‘chargeback’ on a Bitcoin payment. Fraudulent chargebacks can be extremely costly to online businesses and often result in the seller losing the sale, their product (if already dispatched) and also additional penalty fees from their bank.
Bitcoin enables small businesses to expand into international markets that once were inaccessible. For example, there are over 50 countries that traditional payment processors do not serve, usually due to excessive fraud rates. Because Bitcoin payments are final – any risk of fraud is effectively reduced to zero, which means allowing orders from anywhere in the world is now possible.
Right now, you could create a Bitcoin wallet, send your public key to a friend, customer or place it onto your website – and receive money from anywhere in the world in an instant.
Bitcoin Gateways
For a seamless and professional approach when it comes to integrating with existing online shopping carts, take a look at bitpay.com merchant services. You can think of Bitpay as the Bitcoin equivalent of Paypal, except without the astronomical fees and often complicated site integration.
Bitpay allows you sidestep the volatility of the Bitcoin market, as it enables businesses to accept Bitcoin, but convert these payments in real time to your chosen currency and deposit directly to your bank account. You never have to hold any coins, or worry about how to keep them secure.
They offer a starter plan, which is free but will incur a 1% charge on each transaction. This is still cheaper than any of the existing payment gateways mentioned above.
For more serious businesses, the 30 day professional plan costs $30 a month and allows you to accept up to $10,000 a day in transactions, with a 0% transaction fee.
Bitpay are part of the new generation of online payment processors, and as such offer excellent API’s, enabling developers to easily communicate with their services and integrate them into websites with ease.
The Bitcoin hype machine
Bitcoin is becoming more and more accepted throughout the world, with over 60,000 online retailers now accepting it worldwide. Publicity surrounding the currency is ever present and numerous high profile businesses who have started to accept the currency as payment, have reaped the benefits of a great PR opportunity – being seen as progressive and on the cutting edge of technology, and also are seeing a direct benefit on their bottom line.
Here are a just few high profile companies who have jumped on the Bitcoin bandwagon:
overstock.com – a giant online retailer based in the United States has reportedly turned over $1m of Bitcoin sales since they started accepting it as a form of payment.
Expedia: Just yesterday, it was reported on the BBC that global online travel firm Expedia has started to accept payments in the currency.
Virgin Galactic: – You can pay for a trip to space using Bitcoin…!
OKCupid.com: The global dating site.
50 cent (Yes, the rapper…): Accepting Bitcoin for his new album.
There are even rumours that Ebay and Paypal are also considering entering the market and supporting the currency.
A progressive approach
We like to think we are a progressive bunch here at First 10 and often tinker with new technologies in our spare time. In doing so, we are constantly developing new processes and experimenting with these new technologies to make our client’s customers lives easier and our client’s businesses more profitable.
We’re currently experimenting with Bitcoin, have integrated Bitpay in a number of client’s websites and are speaking to others about integrating it into their e-commerce stores.
For no real risk and a multitude of benefits for your business and customers, isn’t it about time you considered giving an alternative payment system a try?
To learn more about how we can help you to leverage payment processing, contact us.
The post Bitcoin boom: An alternative payment system appeared first on First 10.