Paypal sucks. Everyone knows it. Unfortunately, we also know that eBay is our only real option since they have all the traffic. Ebay also owns Paypal and over the years they've made it almost impossible for you not to use Paypal as a seller. They tell you it's the safest payment method ever, but that's only if you're a buyer. If you're a seller, even a perfect one, you're still opening yourself up to being responsible for the rampant fraud on the Paypal platform.
This will result in you losing money (and merchandise!) from charge backs by dishonest buyers and even getting your other account funds frozen by Paypal! Sellers hate it, but they have no other options. Or do they? The Crypto space is working hard to answer these concerns! If you'd like to sell your stuff for crypto instead of fiat money you've got options.
The only problem of course is that the traffic is nowhere near eBay levels (yet), but with our support they can get there. In this post I'd like to talk about a few ecommerce solutions that crypto fans can support to take back ecommerce! There's a few pretty neat options, and if they could gain more traction it would change this space for the better.
Auction Your Stuff For Bitcoin With Bitify!
Bitify is an eBay clone for the crypto community. You can buy, sell and trade stuff on here much like you would on the auction giant, but you'll be able to sell your stuff for bitcoin or litecoin instead! This platform has its own escrow service. Want to buy something, but you don't quite trust the seller for delivery? Bitify will hold your bitcoin in escrow until delivery. If there's a dispute they can help sort it out. The system is easy to use, and makes transactions much more secure for both parties. If there's a problem you'll both need to supply evidence in the form of pictures or tracking numbers to the mediator.
Bitify is the most populated of all of the sites I've tried, but they do attract a certain clientele. While illegal items like weapons or drugs are banned from the site there are other questionable items. There's lots of people selling things like heavily discounted gift cards, accounts and other things that could potentially be stolen goods. Though it may be tempting to purchase a $100 gift card for $20 be aware that the price may be so nice, because the seller has purchased them with stolen credit cards!
There are of course more legit sellers. Even ones with hundreds of positive transactions on the platform for real goods like clothing, electronics, bullion coins, video games and many other things. I have a few electronics I want to clean out of my house that I'm going to try listing here. I'm planning to use the money raised for a crypto investment, and if I can sell them here I can skip the messy, expensive step of trying to convert ebay sales into crypto. I'll report back on whether or not I was successful later on.
Run A Shop From Your PC With Open Bazaar!
I don't think many people quite understand this premise, but it's a really cool one. Open Bazaar is more like hosting your own etsy shop on your PC than an eBay clone. You download the open bazaar software. You install it on your computer, and it hosts a store front for you. You can then sell your stuff to other people who have the client and want to buy goods with crypto. They can browse other shops to see what's for sale, and then pay in their preferred currency. Need to take your shop offline while you go on vacation? Just shut down the program. This does mean it will need to be running for you to make sales. If you're offline people can browse your shop.
Browsing open bazaar in the actual app can be tedious, but they're working on a fix. For easier browsing, and to see what sort of stuff is available here you can use bazaar bay which is an online search engine for the platform. I was surprised to see that the kind of people that use Open Bazaar are totally different from the ones that use Bitify. It's a lot less questionable stuff and a lot more organic honey, bitcoin merch and artwork which is nice.
While the audience on Open Baazaar is not huge yet there are some people making a few sales. If you're already selling stuff on eBay, Amazon or Etsy you could of course also list your stuff here for some secondary bitcoin sales, and to help the platform grow! I really like this project, and I hope it catches on, because it's super cool. Oh, yeah - it's also free! Due to the P2P nature of the platform being hosted on your own PC there are no transaction costs like with other sites!
Peer to Peer is a beautiful thing, and it makes it super economical since everyone shares the load. You can also accept over 50 altcoins in your store so customers can pay in whatever they've got without first trading them back to bitcoins, but they will be paid back to you in bitcoins for ease of use. I believe Steem and SBD are on the list of cryptos you can pay with, but ShapeShift says Steem is "temporarily unavailable" so I'm not sure.
Accept Over 70 Alt Coins From Your Own Store!
Want to use a regular store that's hosted on your own domain, but you want to accept bitcoin? No problem. There's a solution for that too! It's not free, but the fees are pretty reasonable. Coin Payments allows you to integrate crypto payments into lots of shopping cart solutions, and it also supports quite a few altcoins(You can even accept Steem with it!)! You can integrate Coin Payments with popular shopping carts like Presta Shop, Open Cart, Magento, woocommerce, Zen Cart and others.
This will of course require you to purchase hosting and a domain, but several of the shopping carts are free software. If you'd prefer to manage your own storefront instead of hosting it on another platform this is a pretty nice option, and probably one of the more economical solutions to accepting crypto in your online store.
Thanks for reading!
Support for 120 altcoins and fiat!