5 Options To Accept Bitcoin For Your Shop In Australia

Cryptocurrency may not yet be sufficiently mainstream to be viewed as an everyday payment option for most, but support is steadily growing. Now past the wild turbulence that made it a tough proposition in the early days, Bitcoin has held its value relatively well in recent years (and continues to grow), and people are taking notice.

Factor in ever-present concerns about the privacy of financial data and it’s easy to see why more and more shoppers would be interested in paying with Bitcoin — and since it’s still something that many stores won’t accept, there’s obvious value in you accepting it. But how can you achieve this?

In this post, we’re going to look specifically at the options for accepting Bitcoin payments in Australian stores (regardless of whether they’re based there physically or digitally). Let’s begin:

Use a CMS that supports it natively

Probably the most convenient option given the prevalence of ecommerce, you can build your online store on a platform that supports Bitcoin payments through its default gateway. This allows you to start taking payments immediately with minimal fuss. One of the first ecommerce systems to accept Bitcoin was Shopify, and it works perfectly for Australian merchants, so for those reasons (and others) it’s a strong option.

Recommend a Bitcoin gateway

If you already have an online store set up using a system that doesn’t support Bitcoin natively, you can probably find a payment integration that will take it. A good example of such a gateway is BitPay, and it has plugins for various platforms including the most popular choices, so you should be able to use that or some other gateway (unless your store uses a very old CMS, in which case you have bigger problems than accepting Bitcoin).

Allow direct wallet transfers

If you’re running a small-scale store and don’t mind simply listing the basic details of your Bitcoin wallet so people can pay into it, this is a perfectly reasonable way to proceed. You can also provide easy access to those details by conveying them through a QR code — a system that works well whether used online or offline.

Get a compatible POS system

If you’d like to accept Bitcoin at your physical store, then a great way is to configure a POS system that supports it. BitPay has an API allowing it to be simply integrated into POS systems that don’t natively do this, but Shopify’s POS system will take it, and over time we’re going to see native support become more common.

Sell and accept gift cards

Perhaps you’d rather not receive any Bitcoins (maybe you’re not sure how to handle them) but you would like to sell things to people who prefer to pay with Bitcoins: if so, what’s the solution? Simply enough, it’s to add a go-between in the form of gift cards that can be purchased from you for fiat currency, traded among people for Bitcoin, then ultimately redeemed with you.

Supporting Bitcoin payments is a solid move at this point, particularly given the extent of ecommerce penetration in Australian retail, so consider what we’ve looked at and decide which option for accepting it is best for you, your business, and your customers.

This guide was written by Kayleigh Alexandra