Shopify allows merchants to accept Bitcoin via Coinbase

Shopify announced this week that the 100,000+ merchants using the e-commerce platform can now accept Bitcoin payments thanks to an integration with Coinbase’s merchant services.

Interested merchants can create a Coinbase account and adjust their Shopify settings to make Bitcoin a payment option.

Shopify merchants Boosted Boards, iOgrapher, Leap Motion, and Soylent were the launch partners for this announcement, meaning they have all integrated Coinbase following a recent private beta testing period.

In a statement published by newsBTC, Soylent said:

“We have been looking for a simple and secure way to accept bitcoin ever since we decided to build our ecommerce website on Shopify. Our customers have been asking for it from the very beginning. We are excited to offer bitcoin payments via Coinbase’s Shopify plugin because Coinbase makes checkout extremely simple while still maintaining a high level of bitcoin wallet security. Compared to other processors, Coinbase provides a seamless end-to-end experience – from the customer checkout to the Shopify storefront to our own secure Coinbase wallet. With Coinbase’s Shopify plug-in, paying for Soylent with bitcoin is easy – customers can log into their Coinbase account during checkout on our site and pay in one step. We believe bitcoin is a valuable and growing currency and are excited that Coinbase is making it simple for us to securely accept bitcoin via Shopify.”

Since last November, Shopify has accepted Bitcoin through a BitPay integration. With the new Coinbase integration, Shopify merchants have a choice as to which Bitcoin payment processors to use.

While both BitPay and Coinbase allow merchants to instantly transfer out of Bitcoin and into fiat currency to avoid volatility risk, Coinbase, which has always offered both merchant processing and consumer wallet services, has been able to deliver a more user-friendly checkout experience, such as two-click checkout and Bitcoin refunds – options that BitPay could not match, reports Pando.

Louis Kearns, director of payments at Shopify, told Gigaom that when it came to integrating Coinbase, it was technically easier for the e-commerce platform to add the alternative payment options.

He said:

“It was actually Coinbase who built the plugin themselves so we were able to turn it on without a whole lot of work from ourselves, but we wouldn’t have done that if we didn’t see the overall benefit in adding a provider like Coinbase to our platform.”

Kearns added:

“We liked their product so we thought why should we restrict shops from choosing which bitcoin acceptance provider to use on their platform when there’s really nothing holding us back.”