Coinbase has recently rolled out Coinbase Commerce which is a new site and feature which allows merchants to accept cryptocurrency directly into their wallet.
You may be wondering how is this any different from BitPay or Coinbase's previous attempt at crypto payment processing?
From the looks of things, again this just came out yesterday so still brushing up on it, it looks as if this service is completely seperate from the Coinbase website so payments will not go into Coinbase. You will have your own wallet that takes in the payment.
Why is this interesting? Well with BitPay and Coinbase's previous ecommerce payment system you essentially still had a middleman between you and your customer. In many ways this isn't any different than the traditional merchant processing we do with credit cards.
The whole point of crypto is to get the middle men out of the way as they all take fees and impose rules on sellers, have lists of prohibited items, etc.
From the looks of it with Coinbase Commerce the payment goes directly from your customers wallet into your wallet, at no point is Coinbase Commerce taking the payment. Because of that I don't believe they are considered a payment processor, it's more like they are just providing a payment gateway. Because of that the program is open to anyone in the world. I don't believe they'll have to issue you a 1099 at the end of the year and best of all there likely won't be any limitations in terms of "prohibited categories" like Paypal, Stripe and most traditional payment processors have.
This is something the crypto space has needed for a long time, like I said previous companies to handle crypto merchant processing have really just been another third party invovled in our payments, this platform seems to make the experience of matching payments with purchases easier while keeping Coinbase out of the middle of the transaction.
In this video I also walk you through an actual purchase on a Shopify site who's using Coinbase Commerce so you can see what the user experience is like for a customer