How to Accept Payments in Cryptocurrencies

If you’re looking for ways to grow your business, you don’t always have to start by expanding your product portfolio or increasing your marketing budget. Sometimes, the solution could be as simple as introducing new payment methods.

Why would businesses refuse potential clients just because they don’t support more modern payment methods? Accepting cryptocurrency payments is only a matter of choosing the right solution.

As the world of cryptocurrencies is getting more and more popular among the public, more and more people are interested in using their cryptocurrencies not only as an investment but also as a currency to purchase goods and services.

In this article, we explore several options for ecommerce business to accept payments in cryptocurrencies—be it Bitcoin, Ethereum, or any other coin. (Several thousand are currently in use.)

Why accept payments in cryptocurrencies?

There are several reasons why your customers (or you yourself) may prefer to pay in cryptocurrencies, or “crypto”.

International potential

Cryptocurrencies allow for smooth and speedy international transactions. With crypto, there is no need to pay in foreign currency, wait for the bank transfer and conversion to happen and bear the costs of exchange fees. The customer’s bank may even decline the payment if it’s made to a distant country, even though you as a storeowner would happily serve the customer.

Convenient for investors

If your customer has their worth stored in crypto, they do not need to sell the crypto for money (and bear the costs of fees) to use that money to pay. The customer can simply transfer the value they already have in the cryptocurrency.

Financial privacy

Your customers may not want to use regular card payments because they may not want to show the purchase on their bank account statement. Cryptocurrency transfers are made between wallets identified by their alphanumeric strings, so the account holders are much more difficult to trace.

Lower transaction fees

With crypto, you do not need to pay the various transaction fees that are usually associated with regular card payments.

The risk to this, however, is the accounting difficulty—it may be hard for you to determine the exact value of, say, Bitcoin, at an exact time, and you may even need to calculate different values at different times (at the time of purchase and at the time of your tax duty, such as VAT).

In this article, we discuss three ways how you can accept payments in crypto:

• Customer pays in crypto, you get money
• Customer pays by transfer in crypto equivalent to currency value
• Customer pays in crypto as a legal tender

Customer pays in crypto, you get money

Open an account at a service that accepts payments in crypto and executes the settlement (the transfer of funds to your account) in a fiat currency—a regular national currency, such as EUR or USD. This means that while the customer uses crypto from his wallet to pay, you receive the equivalent in “regular” money.

This method is the simplest from the accounting point of view, as you can book your income in your local currency. And yet, you give your customers the option to pay with Bitcoin, Ethereum, or any other supported cryptocurrency they choose.

Shopify even lists several services that offer native integration.

As for accounting and invoicing, you simply register the purchase price as income in the currency the payout was made and issue an invoice for the amount in fiat currency.

You pay the VAT derived from the purchase price in fiat currency as listed on the invoice you issue.

Customer pays in crypto to your account

This method is similar to a payment by bank transfer, only the customer doesn’t send you money, but rather crypto. When the customer orders something from you, you calculate the equivalent of the purchase price in the chosen cryptocurrency and request the transfer of that amount of the crypto to your wallet.

You can determine the value of the purchase, for example, by averaging the cryptocurrency market value on the largest crypto exchanges during that day.

In this solution, you do not need to rely on any provider and at the end of the transaction, you receive the purchase value in crypto to your wallet—which may be desirable for you. However, determining the value of crypto is entirely upon you as the seller, and you may come to disagreements with your customer about that.

You can also use a service—like, for example, BTCPay Server that integrates with Shopify as well—that acts as a “payment gateway”. This service facilitates the payments of crypto to your wallet, making the transfer process hassle-free for you.

For invoicing and accounting, you register this income in your accounting books as a “fiat currency equivalent” and you issue an invoice for the same amount in fiat currency.

On the invoice, you state the purchase price with the clause “the payment of the purchase price was satisfied by the transfer of crypto in an equivalent value.”

You pay the VAT derived from the purchase price as converted by you or your payment provider.

Use the cryptocurrency itself as a legal tender

In one country, you can use crypto as legal tender. That means that cryptocurrency is recognized by the local legislation as a means to complete a monetary payment.

At the moment, El Salvador is the only place in the world that does this since 2021. In 2022, the Central African Republic (CAR) had also passed a law that accepted Bitcoin as a legal tender, but then repealed that law in 2023.

In El Salvador, you can basically account and invoice in Bitcoin just as you would in any fiat currency.

Hopefully, more countries will follow suit. However, for now, unless you conduct business in El Salvador, it’s best to stick to one of the other methods of accepting crypto payments.