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I have an online store and would like to begin accepting bitcoins. How can I go about doing this?
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I have an online store and would like to begin accepting bitcoins. How can I go about doing this?
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There are a number of ways one can go about accepting Bitcoin on a web interface. Keep in mind as you review these options that Bitcoin is still a young technology and many of these options aren't what you'd call "friendly" just yet. That said you do have quite a few options depending on your level of expertise and technical requirements:
4In before cries of plagiarism: All data herein comes from other answers, including my own original answer. Per the asker's request I have compiled the finer points of each answer into one large answer which is appropriate to a larger array of scenarios than any of the individual answers alone. – David Perry – 2011-09-20T23:07:02.933
Unfortunately the bounty ran out before your answer was posted, but I'll definitely accept this one. Good work! – eMansipater – 2011-09-21T14:32:49.033
1Yeah, I wasn't really in it for the bounty anyway. I guess that 100 rep loss is what I get for spending a weekend at Disneyland instead of on StackExchange ;) – David Perry – 2011-09-21T15:47:59.657
Bit-pay is different from the other services because they allow the merchants to be paid in USD so they don't have to worry about price fluctuation and dollar conversion. The website accepts bitcoins, but the owners never have to manage them. Bit-pay also offers several shopping cart plugins such as WHMCS, OpenCart, Zen Cart, Magento, etc.
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You can use services like BitcoinPayFlow or Bit-Pay.
I'm working on a payment module to integrate BitcoinPayFlow with OpenCart, watch the project here - it should be ready within a couple weeks.
Edit: Bit-Pay just released an OpenCart payment module. See here.
3I would advise against a solution that depends on another site staying afloat. If yours is more then a casual website it will be worth the effort to have a bitcoin solution that runs on your own server. – lathomas64 – 2011-08-31T15:16:19.800
1I agree with lathomas64. I think it's a bad idea to recommend third party solutions as the accepted answer. We've seen a very high failure rate with third party solutions, and bitcoind gives you the functionality you need. – Joshua Kolden – 2011-09-04T20:12:31.273
I both agree and disagree. Both solutions (JSON RPC and third party payment processors) have their place. The reason I suggested BitcoinPayFlow and Bit-Pay is because they are easy to setup as they don't require much technical knowledge. BitcoinPayFlow is nice because it forwards all payments as soon as they've been confirmed so they don't often have much of a balance. – Simon Trigona – 2011-09-04T21:58:33.820
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You should definitely checkout https://bitcoinnotify.com/ service. They work noticably different than the existing solutions:
To implement this you need to keep track on your side which order is linked to which btc-address. When a payment is confirmed you can use the address again for the next order
Advantages:
I hope that soon similar services appear, so you could subscribe at multiple sites for notification. So there is no single point of failure anymore.
You should note the risks also, e.g. that bitcoinnotify colludes with one of your customers (or becomes one of your customers) and fraudulently notifies you to ship something that hasn't actually been paid for. Hopefully that would be quickly reported if it happened, and folks that use them could switch. But there is also always the risk of "he said - she said", unfortunately. – nealmcb – 2011-09-17T18:26:50.997
1The ideal combination would be something like an open-source version of bitcoinnotify that you could run yourself, preferably with a private key known only by the service used to sign notifications to the website to validate their authenticity. – blueadept – 2011-09-20T20:23:11.377
2Upvoted for the potential of having a wallet offsite. – eMansipater – 2011-09-08T15:46:55.113
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Take a look at the bitcoind json api.
You will have to run the bitcoind services on a computer accessible by your website. The computer you run the service on should be very secure since it holds your wallet. Development is underway to allow you to have the wallet file located elsewhere.
For added security you can keep a copy of your server wallet file on your computer and regularly transfer funds to a more secure account.
There are also people who provide this service. However this is not as secure, and you should carefully review the options before trusting one of these services. Nevertheless these can be an easy alternative if you can accept the risks involved.
2You can always run bitcoind on a separate machine from your web server and since the JSON API supports SSL the added security risk is negligible. Of course that also doubles the possible points of failure, but if you have no other choice it will at least solve the problem. – David Perry – 2011-09-01T18:35:37.843
Also note, you will need a VPS or similar. It will not work on webhost. – Codler – 2011-08-30T23:27:56.130
1I think you mean shared host, and yes you should not run a bitcoind on on any server that you do not have complete control of security on. – Joshua Kolden – 2011-08-30T23:35:55.307
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There are a number of shopping cart interfaces currently available, though a fair number of them relied on the now-defunct MyBitcoin API. It is also fairly easy to integrate your own code with the JSON API as there are libraries available in most common languages, such as ASP.NET/C#, PHP, Python and many others. VPS or dedicated hosting is recommended since the bitcoin client can then reside on the server itself, but as bitcoin's JSON API supports SSL as of version 0.3.14 it is reasonably secure for the bitcoin client to reside on another system and allow your web application to connect to it remotely.
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You can also have a look at blockonomics merchant service. It allows you to accept bitcoin directly into your wallet and is the only service right now that handles gap limit problems itself.
2Done. Hopefully my answer is to your liking. – David Perry – 2011-09-20T23:05:37.897
I run a small business and would like to start accepting bitcoin but im not a computer tek can you, put it in lay person talk – None – 2014-01-29T23:19:50.407
This info is available via a simple google search and even on Bitcoin.org, Bitcoin's official website. – John T – 2014-02-03T02:27:03.987
3There are many particular services/solutions mentioned here. Does anyone want to synthesize a bunch of them into a guide for how to implement? That would be ideal since I would prefer not to "choose" one service over others. So the ideal answer should start "It will depend on your level of technological expertise and your existing software stack:" then break it down starting with 'slap on an address' and ending up at code-your-own. – eMansipater – 2011-09-09T14:43:24.987