Recently I have had the chance to work with Hive Pay a bit and although I have seen it before, as with anything you just have to use it to realise that it is pretty darn dandy.
For one thing, they basically implement every Hive Engine token and I would hazard a guess this is auto, unless you a shit-shit token then maybe not but @hivepay-io can correct me on blacklisting tokens or rather just finding some not good for transactions.
I think if it is a direct token transfer then that should be fine, but conversions would not work unless there is not a diesel pool.
Using Hive Pay
I think the first time I saw Hive Pay I just concluded it is a nice little feature, but did not really know why would I not just add my own keychain button?
It is the convenience, it is the same thing you see in woocommerce or shopify, these checkout plugins, mostly they would be specific to a local vendor that handles card payments but this one is for Hive and Hive Engine token payments.
However you will need some sort of hosting, even if it is a free one where you can put your own HTML on a page, and that is the very least you need.
Then with a simple HTML form you get a nice little button that will handle the rest... Mostly.
The steps for growth
I am actually a big fan of take it slow, although I am also someone who will be quick to say that something seems too small or just not impressive enough and I will just leave it be.
Usually, someone else then becomes a millionaire by doing the exact thing I discounted. Although to be fair I don't prey on people and trends.
With Hive Pay and any Ecommerce solution really I get it, and I like it because they take the hassle out of trying something. You don't feel like you invested a lot and the world owes you so with all these options. You can just start with a damn button.
Have a product, get a Hive Pay button on it and if someone wants to give you some Hive or another token you like for the product. Then so be it.
You can start by hosting on free static hosting no need for anything fancy, Build out your product catalog and accept Hive for payments. The inconvenience here is manually checking what was received and then handling delivery. If it is a physical product, then you were going to do that anyway. If it is a digital one, then just tell people, hey you will get your stuff in the next 24 Hours.
Obviously, I am not buying from you again if you don't send it, and really it is my job to do due diligence on whether you will give my stuff. This is blockchain still.
That kinda leads me into the rough as I wonder how @hivepay-io handles bad merchants, also why not have some basic link button with no IPN for simple things like saying listing products directly inside a Hive post.
Ok back on track
IPN and the benefits
The real benefit is that they send automated payment verifications. If you have dealt with Hive API before you know this can just be a hassle for something simple. Obviously, since they use Keychain you could do it yourself. Let's assume now you want to add other methods like Hivesigner or HAS.
Although the latter will not care which is used. I have not used HAS myself yet but I wanna wanna.
But, to add options for all those payment methods you will need a lot more code, which is why it is best to be on a platform that surely would want to provide those features.
The point is you get to just focus on handling a payment that got confirmed for sure. No dealing with cancellations etc, just wait for confirmed payment and process it.
Then you can upgrade your site a bit and add the processing for that. This opens a whole avenue of convenience since now everything is completed in usually less than a minute.
Ontop of that Hive Pay allows you to set up recurring transfers and if you have a bit nicer website you can fully use their Cart option or as they call it Checkout to make things go into a cart and then have people do the payment for everything.
Once they pay, again you just wait for the IPN (Instant Payment Notification) and deal with it.
You can further upgrade that with what I mentioned earlier about the just needing a link in a post, however you will need to build your own way to handle that - just a diff page for each product if on static hosting - then send it off to Hivepay.
Is it the greatest?
For Hive I think it is one of the only ones bridging the gap between our little crypto bubble and actual usecases.
The more people who use and or help develop such applications or extend existing application ecosystems the more we find real adoption.
Ecommerce is a big business, and how many here actually write basically books from their posts alone?
Compile that, slap a Hivepay button on it and sell it.