Selling Physical Goods for Bitcoin or Crypto Currency? As a Small Business, a Little Guys Outlook.
In the article I am going to talk about taking crypto-currency as payment for a physical product from the point of view of a small business and the problems and roadblocks I ran into with the setup and the promotion of taking Bitcoin.
First I am going to plug the business. https://sempmachine.com/
We make tabletop CNC mills. Our target consumer is the hobbyist and the inventor, the premise behind the product is that it is quite difficult and expensive to get prototypes made for your inventions or crafts (upwards of 10,000 USD for just one mold) and 3d printers are not as accurate and that materials usable are few, unlike mills that can produce parts in materials ranging from woods and plastics to stainless steels and bronzes.
Now that the shameless plug is done.
I have seen many businesses offer Bitcoin as a payment option, most of which are small and appear to be fairly successful. The issues I ran into when researching offering Bitcoin as a payment option is that many of these small companies are related to the cryptocurrency movement. Offering mining hardware or software... Beyond those smaller companies of course there is the famed Overstock, Airline ticket companies Ect.. all seeming to do decent sales from crypto leveraging their internet presence to accomplish the sales.
But my particular business doesn't fall into these categories, my product is not directly related to crypto and I am too small to leverage my name or internet presence to accomplish this goal.
But as a crypto enthusiast I had to offer this as a payment source, fully believing that crypto will be the future of commerce across the globe.
So with that in mind I stepped up to the plate and researched how to integrate bitcoin into my cart. I ended up using a Wordpress plugin called GoURL Bitcoin,I have much love for the makers of this plugin it was easy to use and easy to setup. So after creating a Wallet for my business I went about promoting the monumental occasion on social media and made a amazing deal if purchasing our products with bitcoin.
I can't say the response was overly positive or negative, what I did learn was that the mass majority of people do not have bitcoin and do not even know where to begin to acquire some.
Like the internet in the early 90s people just don't know enough about it or what it can be used for.. Not that this particularly deterred me from my goal of selling my product for Bitcoin.
So I spent the last week or so sounding like a Coinbase spokesman and trying to teach potential customers about crypto, wallets, and its uses.
I have yet to make a sale, in fact since my promotion is Bitcoin exclusive I believe I have lost out on sales due to the complexity of acquiring and using Bitcoin. With customers giving up or possibly waiting for the sale to be offered in regular USD.
So in my eyes the biggest hurdle a small business has in offering a cyrpto payment method is that beyond the enthusiast or savvy investor that took a great deal of time to learn their trade and passion.. The normal consumer is quite intimidated by the whole process of using bitcoin to buy something.
I am very interested in hearing if any of you ran into the same kind of issues..
How you over came those issues or really any advice you could give me on how to explain the process of buying Bitcoin and sending bitcoin in such a way that a normal consumer could feel comfortable using the platform to make purchases.
Thank you all very much for reading my piece.
My suspicion, and this may be coming from an unusual place, but it's probably unwise to try and get ahead of your clients in terms of what currencies they want to give you. If there was a demand for your services being delivered in bitcoin, if people had asked repeatedly if they could buy a CNC with bitcoin, it would be a different thing.
But as a small business owner, you know that if there's no demand for a product it doesn't matter how much you want to sell it to them – they won't buy it. They have no need for it. They have no passion for it. As such, they don't want to use it.
This is a harsh truth, but it's absolutely true.
As a small business owner, you can't afford to tie up physical resources that could go toward improving the business that you do chasing some imagined business that you don't. Luckily, it's really easy to keep a bitcoin wallet for the business stuck over to the side and it costs you nothing to maintain.
Here's the honest truth: most people don't want to pay with bitcoin because the service fees in the overhead and the hassle are a bloody nightmare. As a consumer, you never know what the value of the stuff in your wallet is going to be from day-to-day or week to week, and as such you can't make good, informed decisions about what reasonable costs are. Similarly, as the business owner, because of the crazy volatility and the absurd transaction fees, you can't decide from day-to-day how much something should cost. Without the ability to gauge costs, you can't run a business.
So if the question is "how can I explain the process of buying bitcoin and sending bitcoin in such a way that a normal consumer would feel comfortable using the platform to make purchases?" You can't.
That's because a rational consumer wouldn't feel comfortable using the platform to make purchases.
This is probably not the answer that you wanted to hear, but it is a true answer.
It is true that I have not had requests to buy the CNC for bitcoin before this point.
There is demand for the product specifically, I have had a good amount of inquires about the promotion and I do decent in sales for traditional currency.
About bitcoin specifically it just seems like it is intimidating for them.
Your answer is very true though.
We are not specifically worried about the volatility of bitcoin or our physical stock because we are supported by a parent company.
We are not planning on converting any bitcoin gained from the sales into USD.
At least that is my understanding from the conversations I held with the co-owners regarding this move.