Hi there,
I few years ago I bought some stock inventory from a merchant I befriended with. My plan was to sell these goods (mostly hats and beanies) over Ebay and Amazon. Unfortunately, these platforms charge quite high fees, so I thought to sell it in my own shop. Hence, I am in the cryptospace, I it would be cool to accept bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as a payment. So I did some research and tried several things and finally launched my shop under shrypto.com. My claim is “shop with crypto @ shrypto.com” (imagine a cool radiovoice saying this). But this article is not about my shop it is about the underlaying technology.
From my point of view this setup only make sense if you plan to run a small to medium sized online shop. If you plan to sell thousands of different products WooCommerce is not the right choice for you. But if you instead plan to sell some handmade stuff or a download, this setup will fit your expectations.
You basically only need three things: weed, woman and wine or Wordpress, WooCommerce and MyCryptoCheckout. Of course, this article does not end here 😊 I´ll give you a basic step-by-step guide to setup your shop.
Step one: Wordpress
Wordpress was invented as blogging software but it evolved to a free and open-source content management system. It is the fundament of your online shop. It offers a super smooth backend and a lot of third party plugins to customize your site. To run it you need to own domain, like shrypto.com in my case and some webspace. I don’t want to get into the details here but you have to upload the wordpress software via ftp up to your site and configure it in your webbrowser. You can find a good instruction here.
Step two: WooCommerce
WooCoomerce is also open-source and it is a third party plug-in for wordpress. It offers various themes for your shop is easy to handle. To install WooCommerce just follow these steps. Because this is just a brief explanation, I don’t want to get into the details but you should do the following steps.
Add terms-of-service (optional but important)
Add privacy GDPR statement (optional but important)
Step three: MyCryptoCheckout
I spend some time to find this nice service and also tried other payment providers like BitPay but the big downside of the most crypto payment providers is that they demand an KYC and fees. MyCryptoCheckout ist a true peer-to-peer service with 0% fees and super easy to setup. You just have to install the plugin and head over to the settings, enter your crypto addresses, activate it as a payment method and your are done. Your customers can now pay with crypto. Additionally you can setup a link to a exchange and automatically sell any received cryptocurrencies into fiat or stablecoins (USD, USDC, USDT, TUSD). This is a great tool for merchants who want to accept bitcoin/altcoins but prefer to cash out immediately to avoid market volatility.
Bonus step: Add a print on demand service
So you´ve setup your shop but only offer a few products (like I did) and want to expand your product range? Various print on demand services offer WooCommerce plug-ins, so can sell stuff that you don’t have to pay upfront and store. For instance, shirtingo.de offers a service to design your product and a simple way to sync it with your shop. I asked a buddy send my over a graffiti design and made a nice product within 5 minutes:
TL:DR: Install wordpress on your domain, install woocommerce as your shopsystem & MycryptoCheckout as your payment method.
Feel free to browse around my onlineshop at shrypto.com to get a look and feel of the shopsystem. I like the minimalistic look and it´s a free theme, get it here. If you want to buy something
I´ve setup a voucher for my publish0x buddies, just enter “publish0x” in the checkout process and you get 10% off your order.
Right now I accept itcoin – BTC, BitcoinCash – BCH, Basic Attention Token – BAT, ChainLink Token – LINK, Dash – DASH, DigiByte – DGB, DigitexFutures – DGTX, Ethereum – ETH, Litecoin – LTC, Monero – XMR, OmiseGo – OMG, Tron – TRX, Zcash – ZEC aswell as paypal and banktransfer.
