Integrating crypto payments requires flexibility

Welcome to “The Merchants Guide to Accepting Crypto: The Questions to Ask,” a new PYMNTS series aimed at helping merchants large and small, online and in-store, who want to accept crypto payments figure out what they need to know in order to move forward.

In this fifth installment of the seven-part series, PYMNTS spoke with Shaan Katyal, chief implementation officer at crypto payment technology firm BitPay, about digital asset integration and the questions companies considering working with a crypto payment processing partner need to ask.

The part: Competence, experience and focus are essential when choosing a crypto payment processor

Second part: Supporting the right cryptos and wallets is key when choosing a payment processor

Part Three: Getting Crypto Payments Compliance Right Requires Deep Experience

Part Four: Experienced traders require sophisticated answers to evolving crypto questions

There is a fairly simple answer to the question of why a merchant would want to integrate crypto payments.

“Crypto is growing in popularity, not just as an investment, but as something that consumers can use to pay for their goods, pay for their services – whether it’s for a new pair of shoes, a nice big screen TV or even a trip”, Katyal told PYMNTS. “It is important to be able to make your products available” to consumers who want different payment methods.

“And crypto is becoming more and more widespread,” he added. “It’s becoming a standard, and businesses should really start thinking about the lost opportunity to capture those additional customers who have cryptocurrency holdings that they might not otherwise have seen with a traditional payment method.”

But once you get past the “should we,” it’s the “how do we,” which means choosing a company that can quickly and nimbly integrate crypto payment processing capabilities.

The flip side of that is to make it as easy as possible for potential crypto customers to shop with you, he added.

“If you’re a business that wants to accept cryptocurrency and capture the new market, the new customers that you may not have seen before, it’s important to give them options,” he said. “Don’t limit yourself to a specific cryptocurrency, don’t limit yourself to one wallet; which will limit your potential market size and deter many customers who would otherwise be very interested in doing business with you.”

BitPay integrates more than 100 digital wallets, he added.

Start with everywhere

One of the first things to think about, Katyal said, is making sure the same customer can visit your website, mall and pop-up location seamlessly.

“You have to be ready to deploy your payment methods across the omnichannel experience, that’s critical,” Katyal said.

“When you do that, you need to look for partners that have a variety of integration options, not a one-size-fits-all where you have to fit into their model,” he added. “We like to take the approach, let’s have as many different code libraries, as many different plug-ins for e-commerce sites as possible.”

The goal, he said, is to work with a processor partner that can make the process as plug-and-play as possible. BitPay supports 10 open source plugins such as WooCommerce, WordPress and Magento 1 and 2, as well as six programming languages ​​and five integrated solutions: Shopify, Wix, Foxy, 3DCart and Blesta. All this is very important when it comes to the speed of implementation, said Katyal.

“It’s pretty hard to talk about e-commerce startups without thinking about Shopify,” he said. “They’re one of the elephants in the room, and we have plug-ins for Shopify.”

However, he added, there are many other legitimate business retail platforms out there.

“We are working on a Wix implementation,” Katyal said. “There are others who have integrated to BitPay to provide their own plug-in support as well – I think Flow Commerce has an implementation for Shopify – but you can’t have a conversation around e-commerce without talking about WooCommerce/WordPress [and] Magento. These are the big players who run most of the internet in terms of online transactions.”

Checking out code

“But what if you’re a business that’s not on one of these platforms?” Katyal said. “You have a very customized customer experience that a traditional plug-and-play integration doesn’t work for – that’s where open source integration methods really come into play.

When you’re in the process of selecting a partner, you should really take a look at their selection of code libraries. Have they thought through developer kits to allow you to take the code and adapt it to your own back-end systems?

“The world of customer experience for e-commerce and in-store, for omnichannel in general, is constantly changing,” he said. “It’s too risky for us to just assume that if we just have a Java SDK or we just have a C# SDK, that’s going to be enough.”

Katyal noted that it’s not just the biggest companies that have these problems, pointing to both brand new firms experimenting with the latest tools and to “decades-old companies with the oldest systems or just the most deeply entrenched systems you can imagine. “

Test the water

There is another solution for companies that may not want to take the full leap into accepting crypto, although the implementation can be very quick and easy for the customer.

“If a merchant wants to see if there’s an appetite for cryptocurrency,” without the upfront costs and technical work of developing a full back-end integration with a cryptocurrency processor, Katyal said it’s a very simple, non-integrated solution BitPay calls Fast checkout for web.

Simply put, it’s a QR code on a tablet or smartphone that clients can scan and pay with their device.

“It’s something we do a lot today,” noted Katyal. “The automotive industry is a very real example for us, but also yachts, high-end clothing. We have some major luxury clothing retailers.”

Economy and security

With the right processor, integrating crypto payments is generally quite easy – but not always, for example when the merchant has a custom-built or legacy system. If a simple fit isn’t available, he said you want to make sure the team behind your payment solution has the experience and expertise needed to customize it and help you integrate it.

“Not only from a technical perspective, but more importantly, an operational perspective,” Katyal said. That means “the finance and accounting teams, the information security — which has to be handled very professionally — so it’s not just an omnichannel customer experience. It’s a completely different implementation from an internal security perspective.”

Although it may not be the same information you deal with when dealing with credit cards or checks, consumers’ private information is used to know your customer identity (KYC) validation.

“I want to stress the importance, when you’re looking for a payment processor in the crypto world — or traditional payments — you have to look at the history of that company,” Katyal said. “You have to look at their standards and practices room information, security perspective.”

Cryptocurrency can be considered a decentralized payment method, he said, but a processor must take regulatory compliance seriously.

If there’s a takeaway, Katyal said, “It’s that cryptocurrency needs to be treated and viewed as a professional payment method, a traditional payment method, when it comes to all the information security best practices that are important to an organization.”

When choosing a vendor, he added, “You really have to ask, ‘How are you handling your customer’s information? What are you doing with it? How secure are your integrations? Who is involved? What are the company’s policies in terms of security and data processing practices?’ ‘

“It will quickly help you weed out the unprofessional processors and narrow the selection process to those who are on the up and up – which is an important thing when it comes to all payments, including cryptocurrency.”

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