Smooth, familiar experience key for crypto payments

Welcome to The Merchants Guide to Accepting Crypto: The Questions to Ask, a 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 sixth of seven articles, PYMNTS spoke with Stephen Pair, CEO of crypto payment technology firm BitPay, about exchange rates, exceptions and refunds, and the customer experience question companies considering working with a crypto payment processor partner must ask.

See also: Competence, experience and focus are essential when choosing a crypto payment processor

One of the most important things, Pair said, is making sure they get an experience that’s not only as simple and seamless as possible, but also as familiar.

“Crypto payments can be intimidating for the first-time user,” he said. “Walking them through that and giving them a great experience that they’re ultimately familiar with when they’re making payments is really important.”

That’s why BitPay not only performs extensive tests on wallets and supports more than 100 of them.

“It’s important for sellers to really ask the question, what will the customer experience be like? When either a consumer or a customer business goes to make that payment, what will that experience look like at the end of the day?”

Much of the same applies to the sellers themselves, Pair added. “Ultimately, it all comes down to ease of use on the merchant side, making it as easy as possible to integrate payments.”

See also: Supporting the right cryptos and wallets is key when choosing a payment processor

That means, among other things, making it easy to integrate it into their business software for things like generating invoices, he said. BitPay allows clients to write their application programming interfaces for integration, but it also has a large selection of “client libraries in different programming languages ​​and platforms that they can simply incorporate into the e-commerce platform.”

The same goes for the pre-built plug-ins for commercial or open source platforms, such as BigCommerce of Shopify.

Right price

Regarding the payment process, an important thing is to choose the right cryptocurrencies, he said.

“There are literally thousands of cryptocurrencies out there that can be used for payments, but not all of them work well. Not all of them are going to be around forever,” Pair warned.

So it’s crucial to make sure your payment processor supports the right set of major cryptocurrencies.

A big potential hurdle is exchange rates — something customers tend to be very aware of, Pair said.

“It is very important to us that the buyers on our platform, whether they are consumers or businesses, perceive that they are getting a good value for their cryptocurrency,” he said. Otherwise, he added, they’ll just sell it on an exchange, send dollars or another fiat currency to their bank account, and then make the payment.

This is one reason to consider whether you want a payment processor that is an exchange, he said.

See also: Getting crypto payments compliance right requires deep experience

BitPay is “not an exchange, we are customers of exchanges,” Pair noted. “We monitor the current exchange rates across many exchanges and determine where the market is across all of them, giving buyers the best value for their cryptocurrency.”

Errors and returns

There are some differences, he said.

“You don’t really have slowdowns in the crypto world the same way you do in the credit card world,” Pair said. Nor the type of fraud you see with debit cards.

“What you can see are wallets that don’t behave or users that make mistakes – where they pay too little or too much.”

His firm has a BitPay protocol, Pair said, that ensures payments are correct every time, so there are “zero exceptions” for wallets that support it.

“When these payment exceptions occur, most of the time they are invisible to the merchant,” he said. “For example, if they don’t pay enough cryptocurrency for the invoice … we work with a buyer” to redo the transaction or cancel the transaction so the seller doesn’t have to deal with that.

But regardless of which crypto payment processor you may use, these payment exceptions will happen.

“When they inevitably do, it’s very important to know how the processor handles it — a lot of them leave that up to the sellers, and that can create significant work and effort on the seller’s part to deal with these issues,” he said. “We try to completely shield the seller from that.”

Then there is a refund, either because the buyer has paid too much or for another reason. That process, he said, should be transparent to the merchant, with the processor handling it unless the merchant initiates it.

But that inevitably feeds into the volatility of crypto prices, Pair said, warning that it can be a delicate process that the processor should make as easy as possible for the seller.

See also: Experienced Traders Demand Sophisticated Answers to Evolving Crypto Questions

From the seller’s perspective, if the settlement is in dollars, which most people choose, if they were paid $100, they refund $100. But Pair noted that the client gets back bitcoin or another cryptocurrency, the value of which may have changed.

“We’re dealing with all of this,” he said. “Educating the buyer, making them aware that their Bitcoin is being converted to dollars and sent to the seller, so if they ever need a refund in the future, for whatever reason, it will be based on the dollar amount at the time of the refund, and regardless of current exchange rates at that moment.”

Making sure consumers are educated about it and making the process as easy and transparent as possible for merchants — and their sales associates if it’s a retail store — is important, Pair emphasized.

See also: Integrating crypto payments into merchant POS requires flexibility, industry knowledge

“We make this process a great user experience for the seller – to be able to go in and start the refund.”

It shouldn’t, he said, “work any differently than what they’re used to with card acceptance.”

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