Services
These days it is easier than ever for online merchants and brick and mortar shops to accept bitcoin cash. Today we’re going to introduce six BCH point-of-sale solutions that provide businesses worldwide with the ability to utilize this innovative technology.
Also Read: New Information Heightens Satoshi Nakamoto Mystery
Point-of-Sale Solutions for Merchants Who Want to Accept Bitcoin Cash Today
More people are starting to use the decentralized cryptocurrency bitcoin cash (BCH) for spending because network fees (the cost to send a transaction) are consistently less than a third of a US penny. This encourages merchants to accept BCH because they understand people are willing to use the digital asset, not only as a store of value against fiat, but as a reliable medium of exchange. For instance, on September 1 the BCH network processed more than 2.2M transactions in a community-led stress test and the median cost per transaction (tx) was about 0.001. Market participants willing to spend their cryptocurrency by using the utility BCH offers, gives an online business or mom-n-pop shop a whole new type of clientele.
Bitpay
Last April the firm Bitpay announced that bitcoin cash support would be added to the firm’s point-of-sale platform. Now BCH can be used by any merchant worldwide with Bitpay’s system and just recently the firm revealed BCH settlement has been added. So with Bitpay’s merchant services not only can users can accept bitcoin cash and get 100% settlement in BCH, they also choose to receive settlement with a variety of local fiat currencies as well. In fact, Bitpay merchants can allocate how much settlement they want in BCH and how much they want in fiat, which gives the merchant the ability to avoid cryptocurrency price fluctuations.
Bchpls.io
Bchpls.io is a free bitcoin cash point-of-sale application, allowing any online or brick and mortar merchant the ability to accept BCH for payments. News.Bitcoin.com reported on the platform this past May when the developers launched the application’s open beta so the public could test the software at their own discretion. Basically, all a merchant has to do is register with an email address and a strong password to start using Bchpls. After that users simply enter the extended public keys to the BCH address under their control and they can begin to accept bitcoin cash. Bchpls can be used in a physical store because it provides an access key for both a cashier screen and the customer screen for payments.
Pop
Another interesting merchant application called ‘Pop’ comes from the Handcash development team the creators of the bitcoin cash NFC compatible wallet. Pop also allows merchants to create an invoice for customers after the user registers their Handcash handle which is tethered to their Handcash wallet.
Together Pop and Handcash both have NFC capabilities but Pop invoices can also be paid with any wallet. We gave both Handcash and the latest merchant application ‘Pop’ a test drive recently. Pop is currently in its beta form and the firm is planning to launch its Handcash iOS platform very soon.
Cheddr
Cheddr.cash is a free point-of-sale platform for bitcoin cash acceptance and the application runs on any browser. Similarly to Bchpls.io, there’s no need to install anything to use Cheddr, and merchants can choose to accept zero-confirmation BCH transactions if they desire. The benefits to using Cheddr is that it’s fee but merchants pay much lower transaction fees than traditional payment processors. Cheddr supports the address format cashaddr and the application is open source on Github for review. “No private information is ever stored or transmitted,” explains the Cheddr developers.
Coinbase Commerce
Coinbase Commerce (CC) is an application provided by the San Francisco firm Coinbase that provides merchants with the ability to accept bitcoin cash in a matter of minutes. The application is free and can be used by both physical merchants and online stores. Furthermore, the CC platform has the potential to expose BCH to 2.7M merchants because CC can be integrated with plugins like Woocommerce, Shopify, Magento, Opencart, and Prestashop. Now even though CC is a Coinbase-created application unlike the exchange CC is a non-custodial service which means the merchant maintains ownership of the funds at all times.
Akari Pay
Another free BCH payment platform called Akari Pay was introduced to the BCH community last May. The Akari Global Foundation believes in bolstering BCH adoption and has created a BCH-based payment gateway, and a micro-site builder for crowdfunding. In order for merchants to use Akari Pay, they have to visit the Github repository and follow the installation instructions. The Akari Pay codebase is open source and available for developer review as well. The platform is customizable and merchants can use a variety of themes and colors to go with the BCH-based payment gateway they set up. The developers have created an Akari demonstration video and users can chat with the Akari programmers on Freenode.
Many PoS Solutions Available Today, and Other BCH Payment Gateways in the Works
There are a bunch of options available for both online merchants and physical shops who want to accept BCH in everyday commerce. Furthermore, there are other point-of-sale solutions in progress as well. For example, a development team from the UK has created a BCH-based point-of-sale device called Mini-POS that enables brick and mortar stores to accept BCH.
What do you think about the options available for merchants to be able to accept bitcoin cash? Are there any payment platforms that we missed? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comment section below.
Images via Pixabay, Akari, Bchpls, Coinbase, Bitpay, Cheddr, and Pop.
Do you like to research and read about Bitcoin technology? Check out Bitcoin.com’s Wiki page for an in-depth look at Bitcoin’s innovative technology and interesting history.
