With a market cap of over 300 billion dollars (at least when I’m writing this review), cryptocurrency has gone mainstream.
In fact, not too long ago, I was working out at my gym in Vietnam while listening to two middle-aged Vietnamese women discuss Bitcoin…
The point of that little anecdote is that cryptocurrency has never been more popular than it is now. And that popularity means that you might want to accept cryptocurrency payments at your WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads store.
To help you do that, you need a plugin. And in my MyCryptoCheckout review, I’ll show you how this plugin can help you accept cryptocurrency payments on WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads without any transaction fees or third-party gateways.
How MyCryptoCheckout Works
At this point, I’ve tested a few different cryptocurrency payment gateways for WordPress.
While other solutions certainly exist (GoUrl is a popular one, and Stripe used to offer Bitcoin payments), the problem with those solutions is usually that:
- They require you to redirect your visitors to a third-party gateway to actually complete the purchase
- They likely charge some type of transaction fee, which can add up if you’re getting a lot of payments
MyCryptoCheckout takes a different approach that eliminates those two downsides. Here’s how it works:
- A shopper chooses the cryptocurrency payment method at checkout
- MyCryptoCheckout converts the fiat price into the equivalent crypto price
- The shopper sends the payment straight to your wallet
Now, you might be wondering – how does MyCryptoCheckout automatically mark the order as complete if everything is happening on your site and with your wallet?
It’s actually pretty simple:
MyCryptoCheckout watches the blockchain. Once it detects the payment on the blockchain, MyCryptoCheckout automatically marks the order as paid in your WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads dashboard.
A More Specific Feature List
Now that you know the general process for how it works, here’s a more specific list of the features that MyCryptoCheckout offers:
- 0% transaction fees
- Unlimited transactions for one flat fee
- No middlemen
- Support for multiple currencies
- Option to use multiple rotating wallets
- Real-time exchange rates
- Option to give a discount or charge a markup for crypto payments
As for the supported currencies, MyCryptoCheckout currently supports:
- Bitcoin BTC (Including SegWit addresses)
- Bitcoin Cash BCH
- Dash DASH
- Ethereum ETH
- Litecoin LTC
- Neo Smart Currency NEO
- Zcash ZEC
- Lots of ERC20 tokens (you can also pay the developer to add your own custom ERC20 token)
How Much Does MyCryptoCheckout Cost?
MyCryptoCheckout has a free version listed at WordPress.org. That free version is fully featured. The only limitation is that you can only accept up to 3 successful payments per month (abandoned payments don’t count – more on those in a second).
So while it’s good to let you test things out, a busy eCommerce store will likely need more than that.
Thankfully, MyCryptoCheckout is pretty affordable. You just pay one flat fee for unlimited transactions per month. That flat fee is $59 per year:
MyCryptoCheckout Review: Using The Plugin On Your Site
Now that I’ve told you what the plugin does, let me show you how it actually works.
I’ll use WooCommerce for my example – but remember that MyCryptoCheckout is also compatible with Easy Digital Downloads.
MyCryptoCheckout Account Dashboard
When you first install MyCryptoCheckout, it automatically creates an account for your site to connect to the MyCryptoCheckout API.
You can view your account by going to Settings → MyCryptoCheckout:
There’s not really anything that you need to do here – it’s just an overview of how many payments you’ve accepted and when the exchange rates were last updated.
By default, the data for exchange rates is updated on an hourly cron job. But you can always manually run this cron job by going to the Tools tab.
Configuring Markups Or Discounts For Cryptocurrency
One neat thing that the plugin lets you do is either:
- Offer a discount for people who pay via cryptocurrency
- Charge a markup for people who pay via cryptocurrency to account for the vicissitudes of cryptocurrency
You can use either a flat amount or a percentage. And you can use both positive and negative numbers to account for markups vs discounts.
To access these settings, just go to the Settings tab:
Adding Cryptocurrencies/Wallets
To choose which cryptocurrencies that you want to accept, as well as enter your wallets, you go to the Currencies tab.
It’s pretty self-explanatory – you:
- Choose your desired currency from the drop-down
- Enter your wallet address in the Address box
What’s nice here is that you can:
- Add multiple currencies (obviously!)
- Add multiple wallets for the same currency. When you do this, MyCryptoCheckout will just rotate through the wallets.
Note: because of how MyCryptoCheckout functions (watching the blockchain), you should not use the same wallet address on two different stores as it can mess things up.
Configure The MyCryptoCheckout Gateway In WooCommerce
Once you’ve added your currencies, you need to jump over to the WooCommerce settings to actually configure the gateway.
To access the gateway, go to WooCommerce → Settings → Checkout → MyCryptoCheckout.
Here, you can:
- Enable the gateway
- Turn on test mode (this helps you test things without sending real data to the MyCryptoCheckout API)
- Configure the instructions that display on your website and in the email. These instructions help explain how the customer should send their crypto payment. You can use the placeholders to dynamically insert information
At the bottom, you can also:
- Choose the default status for an order
- Choose the Payment timeout length. This determines when an order will be marked as Abandoned (this what happens if the shopper never actually sends the cryptocurrency payment). By default, this value is 6 hours.
Once you enable the gateway here, MyCryptoCheckout will be available as a payment method at your store.
How MyCryptoCheckout Works For Your Customers
At this point, I’ve shown you all of the configuration settings.
Now, I want to pivot over to how your shoppers will actually experience MyCryptoCheckout on the frontend.
Everything about your checkout process will be exactly the same. Only now, shoppers get a new Cryptocurrency payment method. When they select that, they can choose their desired currency from the drop-down and see the exact conversion rate:
Once they place their order, they’ll:
- See instructions on the order confirmation page
- Receive an email with instructions
Remember, you can change the text for both of these sets of instructions in the payment gateway settings:
Once they send the payment and MyCryptoCheckout sees it in the blockchain, the order will be marked as paid.
As you can see, your customer is never exposed to a third-party at any point in the process – everything stays entirely on your site.
Should You Use MyCryptoCheckout?
If you’re a fan of cryptocurrency, I imagine that you will probably like MyCryptoCheckout’s approach to handling cryptocurrency payments.
Unlike most of the other options, there’s no need to use a middleman, which fits with the crypto philosophy (that is, there’s no point moving to crypto payments if you’re still harnessed to a third-party payment service).
Additionally, the fact that it’s a one-time fee for unlimited transactions is attractive – there’s no need to sacrifice a cut of each order.
As I said, you get up to three transactions per month for free. So, if you’re looking to start accepting cryptocurrency at your WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads store, give MyCryptoCheckout a test and see if it works for you.
Configure the instructions that display on your website and in the email. These instructions help explain how the customer should send their crypto payment. wordpress website backups
ReplyDelete