CoinPayments.net is an integrated payments gateway that provides online merchants with the ability to accept payments in over a thousand different cryptocurrencies.
STEEM and SBD are among the altcoins that can be taken via CoinPayments.net.
CoinPayments.net also provides easy to use plugins for all the major ecommerce shopping cart platforms such as Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce (WordPress), osCommerce and Opencart.
It only charges 0.5% fee for the transactions and is also now providing fiat settlements direct to bank accounts for United States and Euro merchants.
CoinPayments.net first came on my radar when I was researching businesses that would accept payment in STEEM a year ago...
At that time there were around 40 merchants listed on CoinPayments.net taking STEEM payments.
CoinPayments.net popped up again when @theycallmedan mentioned them in a recent post...
That gave me the idea to revisit CoinPayments.net and check in on how many STEEM merchants there are now.
A search on the Store Directory lists 70 as accepting STEEM...
A search on SBD yields just under 50. A quick visual inspection suggests they are a subset of those accepting STEEM...
On its homepage CoinPayments.net claims to be assisting "Over 2,382,000 vendors across 182 different countries".
I believe that figure will be for vendors using their wider range of services. For the alt-coin payment gateway facility a search of 'Any Coin' on the Store Directory yields around 3,800 results...
Although there was an issue with a Ripple 'hack' a couple of years back, CoinPayments.net generally gets good reviews...
CoinPayments.Net - a route to promote STEEM?
This has given me an idea.
Getting STEEM out into the marketplace and getting more merchants to accept payment in STEEM and/or SBD must surely be a very good idea.
More visibility. More awareness. More usage. More demand. Higher price...
This could make a great campaign that the Steem Community could get behind.
I see three parts to the campaign...
1. Encourage the 70 vendors already taking STEEM to keep accepting it
Check out the list of vendors and see if you can make a purchase in STEEM from any of them...
If you spot any that are on the list that aren't actually accepting STEEM or SBD when you get to the checkout, stop the purchase and use their contact form or email to ask them why. Let me know too.
2. Encourage the other 3700+ vendors not already taking STEEM to start accepting it
Check out all the other vendors, cross-referencing against the STEEM list.
Find a few that have something you might possibly like to buy, and then contact them via their contact form or email and tell them you would really like to buy from them IF they accepted STEEM or SBD...
3. Encourage other online stores that don't take cryptos to use CoinPayments.net (and take STEEM/SBD)
Are there any online stores you buy from that you wished would take payments in STEEM or SBD?
Why not contact them and suggest they use CoinPayments.net for a quick way to start accepting crypto-payments - particularly STEEM or SBD.
As an alternative if they happen to be using WordPress and WooCommerce for their online shop you can also point them to the free WooCommerce Steem Payment Method plugin developed by @recrypto and @sagescrub.
Another option with wider scope is Paytomat that @buildteam and @thecryptodrive have been involved with to get STEEM integration.
Anyone think this is a campaign worth pursuing?
It looks like a potentially quick way to get almost 4000 online stores around the world to accept payments in STEEM / SBD.
That sounds like a good idea to me...
Please note I am not being sponsored by CoinPayments.net. In fact I have not had any contact with them nor any direct experience of using their system.
There may will be other, even better similar systems out there. I would love to hear about them if there is.
Also if you have used CoinPayments.net I would be very interested to hear about your experience.
Thank you.
[ logo from CoinPayments.net ]