MVP - how to accept bitcoin in a small online shop
411 sats \ 6 comments \ @kakocuro 13 Mar 2023 bitcoin
A quick and dirty guide on how to get a "small" merchant with an online shop accepting bitcoin. It will not cost the merchant anything and takes a minimal amount of time to setup and the merchant does not have to pay anybody anything.
Note: this is not meant to be bulletproof, just the easiest point of entry I have found. (feel free to suggest something simpler)
  1. make a wallet at https://legend.lnbits.com
  2. in the merchant's eshop - add a manual option for someone to pay with Bitcoin (it is a dummy option - it will not do anything, just allows the customer to select the payment option)
  3. the customer will go through the checkout without payment
  4. the merchant will send the customer an email with an invoice for a sum that the goods cost (ideally, offer a discount, otherwise there is no incentive for customers to use btc
  5. the customer pays the invoice and the merchant sends goods
In the merchant's LNbits wallet, setup a Scrub extension which transfers the incoming sats to whatever storage is under the merchant's control (if available)
As mentioned, this is not an ideal solution, it is very manual, slow, does not show the discounted price in the eshop to the customer, etc. etc. But it is a good MVP which can be iterated upon to make better.
Over time, the merchant can improve on the system when they learn more:
  • for invoice, they can use zaprite.com (a bit nicer invoices) or self hosted btcpay server
  • if the eshop is on a platform that has plugins for btc payments (shopify, wordpress etc.) - perhaps using one of the available plugins will help to make the process better (there are some solutions like coinbase ecommerce, coingate
  • the merchant can move lnbits on their own hosting and connect it to whatever back end they want
  • perhaps the merchant wants to separate fiat shop from btc shop - in that case they can utilize the Marketplace extension in lnbits to setup their btc shop
Since the effort to set this up is minimal, the customer might be more willing to do this just to test the waters before they start investing into something more sophisticated. Of course, this will not work for large eshops since the manual work is too much. It is meant for smaller mom and pops guys.
We have to realize that most merchants do not care about freedom or all that other idological bullshit (at least not just yet) They care about margin/profit and to not overcomplicate their operation, so those are the points to hit when getting new customers onboarded. Just my 2 sats.
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35 sats \ 4 replies \ @DarthCoin 13 Mar 2023
Why not use a full own LNBits instance on any Linux machine, connected to any funding source that LNbits is supporting (including custodial) and use that scrub extension to FW the sats to any other external personal wallet. Or useing the Boltz swap extension and move the sats at the end of the day to a holding onchain personal wallet.
LNbits support also Wordxpress / Woocommerce plugin for webshop directly. Also you have TPoS and LNURL devices extensions for brick & mortar shops. And many other extensions.
If you really want to help a merchant to accept BTC/LN using LNbits at least do it completely, NOT using the demo instance legend.lnbits.
Here I wrote several guides about using LNbits (and soon will release a new powerful one):
And even more guides using LNbits in many different scenarios:
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10 sats \ 1 reply \ @02ad8239c2 14 Mar 2023
dunno if you've seen this, on the theme of LNbits related stuff , maybe of interest to you
a developer fostering a grassroots LN circular economy in Brazil, using a custom made POS device -
'The Power Of Lightning - Interview with Fernando Motolese & POS Review' on Bitcoin News YouTube channel -
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 14 Mar 2023
Yes saw it. Amazing to see how this small community is pushing hard to use Bitcoun. I love it.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @kakocuro OP 13 Mar 2023
Thanks. You are right, it could and ideally should be done better, but the idea was that the merchant (non-technical) can manage it by him/her self without complicating it. They will hardly know how to manage a linux server.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 13 Mar 2023
Your use case is not bad at all. I suggest to analyze first each merchant case and adapt the specific solution proposed that suits better.
LNbits, BTCpay or any other BTC/LN wallet could serve well, but not always are the solutions for everything. Sometimes even with a simple mobile LN wallet a merchant can just start accepting, without any other server / node to setup. But then come the problem of liquidity (see the guide about private LN banks).
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54 sats \ 0 replies \ @DiracDelta 13 Mar 2023
I don't get why there aren't more bitcoiner e-commerce shops. Bitcoiners make high quality, low time preference goods.
Every time you buy something 30-90% of that goes into fiat profits, unless you are buying from a bitcoiner, in which case it stays as bitcoin.
Unlike a job, e-commerce returns are asymmetric, and it can be done alongside a corporate job. Collectively, what this adds up to is improving the "trade balance" for bitcoin holders, which strengthens bitcoin irrespective of new adoption. It's simple, more bitcoiner businesses unrelated to bitcoin, more NGU.
There are very few durable consumer goods sold by bitcoiners, but it would be nice to be able to make one's spending >10% with bitcoiners. This means products that are PRICE COMPETITIVE, not just bitcoin themed chotckies for rich people or luxury focused products. Products can be high end due to being performant rather than luxurious. That's the difference between hard high end or soft high end goods.
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