Bitcoin Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for Bitcoin crypto-currency enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
So, if I wanted to have Bitcoin as a form of method where users could pay, how would I do this? Obviously, there is paypal, where the buyer sends money through pp, which disperses to the seller. So, I need to have this type of system on my site as well. Is there anything like it for Bitcoins?
Thanks!
It depends on where your head is, and what your level of skill happens to be.
You could actually run something like BitEscrow, and integrate it into your site. Or you could run a full on copy of Bitcoind, that would do the job without a payment processor. Of course, that requires thinking about things like security, which you might not want to do.
On the other hand, you have services like Coinbase and Bitpay and Coinpayments, and others, that can take some of the risk away by offering a viable third party interface, for which they, rather than you are responsible.
It also depends on the bigger question; which is, do you want to have Bitcoins or Fiat at the end of the transaction cycle? If it were me, I would want Bitcoins, because I like Bitcoins. But your needs may be different. You very well might want dollars or euros, and that's okay too.
bitpay.com is one, but there are many many others.
You can get paid in BTC or daily in your own currency. And the integration into your existing payment system should be very easy.
BitPay is an electronic payment processing system for the bitcoin currency. It enables online merchants to accept bitcoins, as a form of payment, just as they accept payments from Visa, Mastercard, or Paypal.
BitPay is available in every country, and you can set your prices in over 30 different currencies.
Merchants choosing to keep the bitcoins can be anywhere in the world. Merchants in some countries can choose to receive a direct deposit into their bank account.
alternatively you could just put up your bitcoin address and have people pay you once the transaction is confirmed you could dispatch the goods.
Its like BitPay is Paypal and your Bitcoin address is direct debit card
use Squarespace or Stripe.com for seamless integration.
Use coinpayments.net for acceptance of many other virtual currencies not just BTC.
I upvoted Doctor Evil's response to this question because it has a pretty good explanation of your choices here. However, in case you have some technical know how, I thought I'd mention another option: hosting a Bitcoin-Armory daemon on your server. For the full details on this option, see this bitocointalk thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=92496.0.
The reason I mention this option is that a major issue with hosting a bitcoin service on your site is the possibility of losing your coins to hackers. This has happened in the past with Coinbase, although the Coindesk article was since taken down so I can't link to it. Hacks to bitcoin online wallets are quite common and likely to get more and more popular as bitcoin increases in popularity (and thus value).
The advantage of this approach is that if you set it up right, it's basically unhackable. Here's how to make it totally unhackable:
1) Setup a cold wallet with Armory, with an Armory signing service on an offline internet connected computer, a laptop that you can lock up would be ideal.
2) Setup this daemon so that it can produce new public keys online.
3) Start the daemon on your server and have it setup to give out new bitcoin public keys for every transaction.
That's it. However, this part does really require some technical know how to get the daemon setup on your server. But if you're willing to do this (or hire someone with the programming expertise to set it up for you), you'll have a bitcoin service on your server that is unhackable.
This technique would mean that all the sales from your site would be 100% bitcoins, but you always have the option of setting up a bitcoin wallet on Coinbase and cashing them out to fiat that way, or through another exchange that you might prefer.
