Coinbase Commerce, the part of Coinbase that provides non-custodial cryptocurrency payment solutions, has announced via its blog that it is now offering a newly developed plugin to make it easier for users of the popular e-commerce platform WooCommerce to accept crypto payments.
WooCommerce, which is an open source e-commerce plugin for WordPress designed for online merchants using WordPress, is very popular because the base product is free and it is easy to install/customize. This huge popularity has led to WooCommerce powering (according to Coinbase’s estimate) around 28% of all online stores. This new plugin from Coinbase makes it easy for these millions of merchants to accept cryptocurrency payments from customers all over the world. Currently, four types of digital assets are supported: Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Litecoin (LTC), and Ether (ETH).
Coinbase points out that:
“Note that all payments made through Coinbase Commerce are truly peer-to-peer — when customers send money from their cryptocurrency wallet it’s sent directly to a merchant-controlled cryptocurrency address and processed on-chain by the respective blockchain. This means merchants never have to pay transaction fees to accept payments and always remain in complete control over their funds.”
It is very easy for merchants to sign up with Coinbase Commerce: you just need to give your email address (which will act as your username/login) and the password you wish to use. As part of the registration process, you need to set up two-factor authentication (via the “Google Authenticator” app, which is available for both iOS and Android) “to ensure that you’re the only person who can access your account, even if your password is compromised.” Once you have gone through these two steps, you need to record in a secure place the wallet “recovery phrase” Coinbase assigns to you.
Here is what that Coinbase Commerce dashboard looks like:
If you click on the “Accept payments” button, you will get two choices, as shown below:
Let’s say that you decide you want to accept payment for a product:
For the sake of illustration, I decided to sell a Bitcoin mug. Once I had entered the required information about this mug, I went back to the dashboard:
Finally, it is worth noting that although there are no withdrawal options from within Coinbase Commerce at the moment, Coinbase is promising that they’ll be enabling this feature soon. In the meantime, Coinbase says that “you can use a third-party wallet such as Jaxx to move your funds by importing the twelve word recovery phrase.”
